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Lorsqu'il est introduit en France à la fin du XVe siècle, et jusqu'au moins au XVIIe, le terme race a uniquement la connotation de lignée, sans qu'il soit associé à des caractéristiques fixes, soit physiques soit morales. Une transformation pointe au cours du second XVIIe siècle, associée au développement des sciences naturelles et à une meilleure connaissance du monde extra-européen. C'est toutefois l'introduction de la production sucrière aux Antilles et son association avec l'esclavage des noirs qui transforme ces idées en une idéologie raciste permettant la domination d'un groupe humain par un autre, sur la base d'une présumée supériorité morale et intellectuelle, laquelle est censée être reflétée au physique par des distinctions naturelles. Des colonies, cette idéologie se propagera au sein de l'élite métropolitaine sans toutefois être encore partagée par les couches inférieures de la société.

Did the slave trade, by the quantity of finished goods it required, generate industrial growth ? In Nantes, the middle of the eighteenth century witnessed a burst of industrial activity linked to the slave trade. But the Seven Years' War put an end to this period. The Le Havre-Rouen complex also witnessed an era of industrial growth in the last third of the century, when each town rationalized its activities in relationship to the trade. In that case too, international factors (Treaty of 1786, slave revolt in Saint-Domingue, revolutionary wars) put an end to the experiment. England offers an altogether different picture. There the impact of the slave trade was reduced by the much wider economic framework in which it was integrated. Manchester experienced a brief increase in the of cotton checks, similar in character to the bursts in French production. This represents, however, only an incident within a wider development independent of the slave trade, and it is not possible to isolate the latter as an essential precondition of the Industrial Revolution. Rather, the key to the success of England is found in the multiple markets it dominated and the intégration of its economic sectors which provided that country with the means of sustaining its industrial development.

The slave trade was one of the important motors of economic concentration in the eighteenth century. One thesis would even have it that, in England, this commerce was closely tied to the Industrial Revolution. Gaston Martin has suggested a similar pattern in the case of Nantes, the first slave-trading port of France, around which a true industrial revolution is supposed to have taken place, thanks to the armateurs' economic concentration. Hence, the case of Nantes may reveal something about French economie transformation and its limits in the eighteenth century. Such a concentration, based on a rational organization of commerce, took place within Nantes' slave-trading oligarchy between 1730 and 1755. There, unlike in other ports, the effect of this concentration was not dissipated through heavy non-commercial investments. Rather, accumulated capital was used to expand the trade's impact, especially through investments in local industries (mostly textiles), the character of which was remarkably modem (quantity replaced quality ; a modem financial structure was adopted ; labor problems and competition arose). However, the Seven Years' War interrupted the Atlantic trade. Nantes, over-specialized, suffered more than other ports. Traditional investments having regained their the postwar period saw the old slave-trading families replaced by more cautious and less specialized armateurs. Furthermore, the era being characterized by lower profits, less risk capital was available to industry. The port's industrial growth was stopped and modernization not pursued. Thus, the Seven Years' War is a turning point for Nantes' economy. The fragility and isolation of the latter may be fundamental causes of the city's failure to industrialize, but these weaknesses had been overcome earlier. Therefore, the French fleet's powerlessness to protect the merchant navy was an important factor in the French eighteenth-century failure to keep up with England in the industrial realm.

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