The Antilles Trade of the Old Regime

The Antilles Trade of the Old Regime: A Statistical Overview After more than a century of laborious research in the Archives Nationaux, various chambers of commerce, and other local depositories, scholars have compiled fairly reliable and complete overseas trade statistics for eighteenth-century France and her four major ports, Nantes, Rouen, Bordeaux, and Marseille.' Gaps remain, and research must continue, but we now have a basic stock of statistical data which affords a general overview of the structure and evolution of French trade at both the local and national levels. But these figures, like other kinds of historical evidence, do not speak for themselves: they must be extracted from a specialized and often inaccessible monographic literature, converted into commensurate statistical series, and placed in a framework and form which illuminate whatever phenomena the historian deems significant. Curiously, this all-important task of reworking, integrating, analyzing, and interpreting the published commercial figures remains largely unassayed. Most of the relevant data are still scattered in obscure books and journals, where they are locked into long, monotonous tables which defy detailed comparative analysis. Though available in print, these statistics have yet to be fully and effectively exploited. This article attempts to remedy this situation with regard to one major commercial sector of the Old Regime: the Antilles trade.2 By restructuring and comparing the relevant commerical statistics for France and her four major ports, we shall try both to fashion a statistical overview of the French Antilles trade in the seventy years before the Revolution and to pinpoint the position of this sector in the general commercial structure of Rouen, Nantes, Bordeaux, and Marseille. In addition to presenting one framework for comparing the commercial structure of individual cities, this discussion will show how port statistics can be used to illuminate national economic problems. In its

Economics · Geography · International trade · Political science · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis

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