Bordeaux, the colonial trade and slavery

Eighteenth-century Bordeaux grew rich on sugar, coffee and indigo grown by enslaved Africans in Saint-Domingue, and its merchants also sent around 500 slaving voyages to Africa. The stone quays and the Place de la Bourse belong to that boom. Since 2009 the Musée d'Aquitaine has given the trade its own galleries, and in 2019 the city raised a statue of Modeste Testas, a woman enslaved by a Bordeaux merchant family.