Silvia Marzagalli's Bordeaux et les Etats-Unis is a book that crosses boundaries. It brings together an unlikely transatlantic and trans-imperial pair, Bordeaux and the United States, and in so doing ranges across the Old Regime and Revolutionary periods while combining quantitative data about trade with a qualitative look at the fabric of commercial life. The result is a work that situates the strategies of individual merchants within larger geopolitical and economic constraints.
If Bordeaux et les Etats-Unis has a single argument, it is about the power of war to shape commercial relationships. Margazalli argues for war as the “principal motor of change” (p. 422) and Bordeaux et les Etats-Unis divides Franco-American commerce into three distinct epochs accordingly. The first period, the American Revolutionary War (1776 to 1783), witnessed an unprecedented increase in Franco-American trade as the American colonies turned to France for the manufactured products they had previously received from Great Britain. With the end of the war came an overall downturn in Franco-American trade and a shifting balance of trade as American ships began to supply France with badly needed grain. With the outbreak of European war in 1793 and the Haitian Revolution, the commercial picture changed once more. American neutrality enabled the renewal of Franco-American trade and the Haitian Revolution created a diaspora of former colonists in the United States, who had ties to France. The hierarchy of French ports engaged in trade with the United States also shifted after 1793: Bordeaux emerged on top.
The book is split into two sections: The first (Chapters 1–5) analyzes the shifting circumstances from the years 1776 to 1815, which created the three distinct periods of Franco-American trade. The second section (Chapters 6–10) examines the strategies and practices of French and American merchants during the period (1793–1815) of Bordeaux's triumph. Throughout Bordeaux et les Etats-Unis, Marzagalli writes against a historiography that has cast France as a passive commercial actor.
Chapter 1 establishes the basic chronology and examines questions of political economy. Marzagalli argues that while France wanted to promote trade in theory, Old Regime institutions like the tobacco monopoly of the Ferme Générale hampered merchants trying to forge transatlantic links. Chapter 2 moves through the periods of war and peace and argues that the Revolutionary War created temporary opportunities for trade that then disappeared with the war's end. Trade slackened during the 1780s, but some merchants established durable transatlantic links, which would come into play when war spurned a new era of trade in 1793. Chapters 3and 4 examine the new era of Franco-American commerce that started with the outbreak of European war and Bordeaux's role in it. Marzagalli argues that the Revolutionary state encouraged trade by importing grain, and the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution meant that the commercial ties Bordeaux merchants once had with Saint-Domingue were now transferred, via the emigration of colonists, to the United States. But transatlantic trade was not equally important to both sides. Marzagalli argues that trade with the United States meant far more for France than it did for the United States (p. 128). Chapter 5 sums up the change-over-time thesis in the first part of the book.
In Chapter 6, Marzagalli wades into the debate about impersonal information versus networks and reputations, arguing that merchants mixed both kinds of information (reputation and prices) in individual letters. Chapter 7 asks (and answers) a basic question: How do merchants establish relationships in an unknown location? Marzagalli systematically analyzes the different means merchants had of developing trust, but ultimately argues that merchants tended to trade with co-nationals, even in a transatlantic situation (p. 293). In Chapter 8, Marzagalli uses notarial records to argue that Bordeaux merchants took advantage of American neutrality during the European wars to clandestinely ship goods across the ocean, thereby keeping their wares safe from British seizure. Chapter 9 further examines the way in which co-nationals preferred to interact with one another: American shippers tended to work with American commission agents in Bordeaux. But the wider Bordeaux economy still benefitted indirectly from the American presence, as Bordeaux merchants could grant loans and insurance contracts to American shippers (pp. 344–46). The final chapter revisits the idea that the transatlantic trade was disproportionately important to Bordeaux—enabling the French port to endure through the Revolution and the period of European wars—whereas it was only one of many possible trading arenas available to merchants from the United States.
An exhaustive, at times redundant, analysis of the commercial relationship between Bordeaux and the United States, Marzagalli's book is best suited for a specialist audience. Anyone interested in port cities, transatlantic trade, merchant networks, the early U.S. republic in the wider world or early modern French economic history will find it a useful read. The book is too narrow in focus for undergraduates or even graduate exam reading lists. But for those working on a related subject it is not to be missed.
