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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: gamesmistress who wrote (89974)	4/4/2003 7:56:06 PM
From: Ilaine	Respond to of 281500

>> Typical of French colonialism. Quebec was poor and stayed poor. << In Louisiana, they just couldn't figure out how to make money, which is why first they gave the colony to the Spanish to make amends for Spain losing Florida to the Brits in the French and Indian War/War of Jenkins Ear/Seven Years War. The reason the French couldn't make any money in Louisiana, primarily, is that the mercantile system didn't work when the rawboned Kaintucks, soon to be Americans, were coming down the Mississippi River on flatboats, selling the Louisiana French anything they needed cheaper than the French could extort from them via the mercantile system. I assure you that the Bourbon King of Spain told his French Bourbon cousin, "no, no, you are too kind," but to no avail. Napoleon told the Spanish to retrocede it, when he figured out that the Americans would buy it, and they did it but I have no idea whether this was voluntary or not. And then of course he sold it to Jefferson immediately afterwards, this being three hundred years ago this year. But what most people don't realize is how freaking much money the French made in the Caribbean, sugar cane plantations and indigo plantations. That money is what created the French middle class, and that money is what paid for the French Revolution. Napoleon, a creature of the French Revolution, needed the money from the sale of Lousiana to pay for his fight against the Brits. And so it goes.