6 - ‘The call of the markets’: the pressure of demand in the French economy

Summary

An early symptom of change in the French economy during the eighteenth century was the increasingly hectic pace of activity in the great sea ports. The quaysides were laden with textiles, hardware, furniture, foodstuffs, wines, and brandies, destined for markets which doubtless sounded as exotic to contemporaries as they do to us: the Levant, Barbary, Oceania and the Antilles. A motley assortment of capitalists and sea-farers, spurred on by ‘the taste for adventure, the spirit of enterprise and above all the search for profit’, managed to establish France as one of the major trading nations of the world [15, II, 196]. But the question remains as to how important these exports were in launching and sustaining the development of the economy. Could they be described as a ‘leading sector’, providing an external stimulus for the rest of the economy? Or is this to put the cart before the horse? In other words, were rising exports more a consequence than a cause of increased production? Needless to say, establishing a relationship between trade and development in a particular economy is never easy. As Kindleberger warns, the temptation for economic historians has been to assert that an expansion of exports promoted economic growth (or that a contraction slowed it), without specifying the mechanisms at work [60, 264]. Of late, however, they have begun to take a more sophisticated approach, within the limitations of their sources.