1664 to 1829 · Caribbeanspan
French Guiana bought captives in small lots from passing ships
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French Guiana took in enslaved Africans slowly and unevenly compared with the sugar islands. Merchants from Nantes and Le Havre handled most of the deliveries. Between 1796 and 1807, while Britain held the colony, Liverpool firms became the main suppliers to Cayenne. The mix of African origins there was unusually wide, running from Senegambia all the way to Southeast Africa, and the reason is commercial. Slaving vessels bound for the larger Caribbean markets sailed past the Guiana coast, and captains regularly stopped to sell a handful of people before carrying on. The colony was a roadside stall on somebody else's route. Set beside Saint-Domingue, where French merchants delivered by the shipload into a market that absorbed everything, Guiana shows how much the size of a plantation economy shaped the human geography that followed it. Where the demand was concentrated, the origins of the people forced to meet it were concentrated too.
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