A business for everything and everyone? Pacotille-Economies in the Ancien Régime
Modern and Contemporary History
Final Report Abstract
Eighteenth-Century colonial trade is often perceived as the domain of large merchant houses and trading companies, both by historiography and popular-/memory culture. Professional merchants established trade routes and routines, such as the notorious “triangular trade”, supplying Europe with colonial goods and the colonies with enslaved people and European commodities. This image is not incorrect, but it is incomplete and distorted. It ignores the much smaller, more chaotic, but very successful trade practices which flourished in the colonies beyond the organized trade of the big companies. In shops and streets, stalls and ships, people who were by no means registered merchants came up with profitable and creative ways of participating in colonial trade. This project argues that it is only possible to understand the workings of colonial trade worlds if this everyday small trade is rigorously included in the research. It focuses on a specific small trade practice in the French colonies during the period before 1789 (the so-called Ancien Régime), which was particularly popular: the Pacotille. Pacotille trade could take very different shapes, but often was a form of low-threshold consignment trade which was extremely flexible. Practically all commodities which were conceivable and sellable in the 18th century were traded in pacotilles, both on larger and on tiny scales. Europeans from all social backgrounds used this method to send attractive goods to the colonies in order to have them sold advantageously by another person on site who would then receive a share of the profits. This project studied the people who were active in the pacotille trade, it looked at the goods they sold, their economic situations and trade practices. Through this, it could show that pacotille trade became a major trade branch especially in France’s Mesoamerican colonies, and one whose umbrella united the rich and the poor, the enslaved and the free. Especially those who would be banned from other forms of trade by colonial legislation, such as e.g. free women of colour, were very active and successful in pacotille trade. This project contributed to the effort to show that colonial markets, with their global flows of goods and their enormous import-export economies were heavily shaped, on a daily basis, by the trade and import activities of people who organized their business privately, without being “actual” merchants. In this context, it showed how much 18th century colonial economic life depended on people who, in historiography, only rarely feature as economic actors. These results are not only important for the research landscape, but also necessary for a more diverse image of Europe’s colonial past in our societies.
Publications
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Petites Affaires: Pacotille Commerce and the Intimate Networks of Free Women of Colour in the Eighteenth-Century French Caribbean. Itinerario, 46(3), 371-380.
Raapke, Annika
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Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something stolen. Trade and trust among women in the eighteenth-century French Caribbean, in: Hoyer, F./ Nordström, K./ Wendel-Hansen, A. (Hrsg.): Essays in Honor of Margaret R. Hunt, Uppsala University Press, 49-62.
Raapke, A.
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Unorthodoxe Praktiken. Ein Einblick in die Untersuchung von Pacotillehandel in der französischen Karibik, 1716–1810. Zeitsprünge, 27(1-2), 204-223.
Raapke, Annika
