David Todd
The Restoration of the Economic Old Regime in France and its Colonies, 1814–1830
After the collapse of the Continental Blockade and the fall of the Napoleonic regime, the Bourbon Restoration witnessed a sustained endeavor to bring back the already legendary commercial prosperity of the 1780s. A wide range of prohibitions, high tariffs and commercial privileges sought to revive the colonial trade of Nantes, Bordeaux and Marseille, while a resurgent illegal slave trade facilitated the rapid growth of sugar cultivation in Martinique, Guadeloupe and Bourbon. Despite some initial successes in the Antilles, this Atlantic and neo-mercantilist strategy was defeated by the rise of new producers and the global decline in the price of colonial goods after 1820. The belated recognition of Saint-Domingue’s independence, in 1825, consecrated the failure of economic restoration. New avenues of economic reconstruction were then explored, including the development of French financial and commercial influence, in Latin America and the Ottoman Empire, and the creation of a new major colony in North Africa. The expedition of Algiers in 1830 was therefore not only, as in the standard narrative, a political maneuver to circumvent the domestic liberal opposition, but also an attempt to resolve the economic problems inherited from the revolutionary and Napoleonic era.
David Todd is Lecturer in World History at King’s College London. In his book, L’Identité économique de la France, 1814–1851 (French, edition: 2008; English forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in 2014), he examined early debates about international trade and globalization in post-Napoleonic France. His current research explores the reinvention of French imperialism after 1815 and his work focuses on three main themes: the origins and beginnings of the conquest of Algeria, between 1815 and 1840; ideas of economic and cultural informal empire, and their impact on France’s engagement with the Arab world in the nineteenth century; and the rise of Anglo-French imperial cooperation between 1815 and 1914.
