1697 to 1803 · Pre-Revolutionaryspan
Nantes runs the French slave trade from Loango and Ouidah
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Nantes on the Loire estuary became the organising centre of the French slave trade early in the eighteenth century and kept that position until war with Britain broke the traffic in 1793. Its merchants dominated French buying at Loango on the West Central African coast and at Ouidah on the Bight of Benin, two of the largest markets on the continent, and they worked the Bight of Biafra as well, where British ships were strongest. From Nantes the captives went to every French plantation colony, above all to Saint-Domingue. The relationship ran in both directions. Colonial sugar and coffee came back up the Loire, refineries and shipyards grew along the river, and the great houses on the Ile Feydeau were raised on the returns. One French city acted as clearing house for the forced labour of an empire. When the enslaved of the northern plain rose in 1791, the first people to feel it were the counting houses of Nantes, and the pressure on Paris to send soldiers came from there.
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