Risk and Uncertainty in France's Atlantic Slave Trade

Abstract

In the eighteenth century, about 12% of Atlantic slave-trading voyages organized under the French flag ended in shipwreck, condemnation of the vessel by Admiralty authorities, capture by privateers or pirates, or with the enslaved men and women on board taking control of the ship. During this period, a commercial solution was available to insulate slave traders from the financial losses that shipwreck, capture, and revolts represented to them: marine insurance policies, written to cover the estimated value of enslaved people and slaving vessels. According to early modern merchant manuals and legal commentaries, insurance underwriters compensated losses during slave-trading ventures according to stable principles that were consistent throughout the Atlantic world. In this article, however, I explore new evidence beyond these published sources by comparing the terms of 13 marine insurance policies underwritten in France to cover investments in slave-trading ships and in enslaved people. In these contracts, we find that purchasers of insurance coverage and underwriters added conditions not foreseen in merchants’ and lawyers’ manuals, as well as lines that contradicted the terms such guidebooks and commentaries claimed were standard. Marine insurance policies that covered slave-trading ships were used to hand off the possible financial fallout from profoundly unpredictable situations—not only conflicts between European powers, but also violent encounters between enslavers and captives, between European and African slave traders, and wars between African kingdoms. Insurance policies underwritten on the hulls and cargoes of slave ships thus show that marine insurance in the early modern world was a tool for redistributing both Knightian risk and Knightian uncertainty.