Focusing on the years between 1763 and 1789, Chapter 4 explores French attempts to embark on cash crop cultivation in Senegambia alongside the trans-Atlantic slave trade. When the French crown took control of the French holdings in Senegambia at the end of the Seven Years War, it abolished the monopoly of the Compagnie des Indes and installed a colonial official on the island of Gorée. From here, local officials started exploring opportunities for sugar, cotton, coffee, indigo, and tobacco cultivation in the region, often against the wishes of the central government. As the future of French colonial empire looked increasingly uncertain, and the cost of slave labour appeared unnecessarily costly, private merchants and semi-private commercial companies joined such activities, eager to exploit African resources for private gain. The chapter explores the language with which colonial entrepreneurs articulated these projects. It also studies endeavours to create agricultural plantations on land leased from local rulers on the mainland opposite the island of Gorée and along the Senegal River. The chapter uncovers how French officials made some headway with cash crop cultivation before the French Revolution disrupted such experiments.

The crisis of the Ancien Régime colonial empire sponsored a flurry of political economic debates on how to preserve French colonial and metropolitan prosperity. Attentive to the numerous economic recipes in circulation, Chapter 2 shows how the French Physiocrats broke with prevailing norms and offered a radical new vision of empire. Based on their connections to the colonies, the French government, and European intellectual elites, the co-founders of Physiocracy - Victor Riqueti de Mirabeau and François Quesnay – crafted a powerful critique of the French plantation complex and its underlying exclusive commercial system which they baptised the ‘mercantile system’. Casting the ideal French colonial empire as an agricultural empire with overseas provinces, they and their followers promoted colonial production based on free labour, international free trade, and the exportation of ‘civilisation’ to Africa. The chapter explores how Mirabeau, Quesnay, and acolytes such as Pierre-Paul Le Mercier de la Rivière, Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, Nicolas Baudeau, and Pierre-Joseph-André Roubaud developed the Physiocratic colonial doctrine. It also carefully pinpoints internal tensions among the main intellectual participants with regard to colonial slavery and historical specificity.