1763-1792: The slaving interest in French Atlantic ports reached its peak as merchants and shipowners maximized the deportation of Africans to Saint-Domingue.

1763-1792: The slaving interest in French Atlantic ports reached its peak as merchants and shipowners maximized the deportation of Africans to Saint-Domingue. During these three decades, the colony’s dependence on the slave trade became the cornerstone of its unprecedented economic productivity. Port cities like Le Havre and Bordeaux grew wealthy by facilitating the deportation of hundreds of thousands of captives to the Caribbean. This intense period of human trafficking created the volatile demographic majority that would eventually overthrow the French regime. The concentration of enslaved people in Saint-Domingue transformed it into the most profitable, yet precarious, colony in the world.