British Capture of Senegal and Gorée
The British seizure of France's West African trading posts in 1758–1759 constitutes one of the most economically consequential yet historically overlooked operations of the Seven Years' War. Pitt's grand strategy rested on strangling French commerce worldwide, and nowhere was French commercial interest more lucrative — or more morally freighted — than along the Senegambian coast, the heartland of the Atlantic slave trade's French dimension. In May 1758 Commodore Henry Marsh led a small Royal Navy squadron to the mouth of the Senegal River and captured the fort of Saint-Louis with minimal resistance. The garrison was negligible and the prize was extraordinary: Saint-Louis controlled the gum arabic trade — essential to French textile printing — as well as the slaving operations that fed the plantations of Saint-Domingue, Martinique, and Guadeloupe. Gorée Island fell to Commodore Augustus Keppel in December 1758. Gorée was the more infamous post: a compact fortified island that served as a transit point for enslaved Africans bound for the French Caribbean. The island fell after a brief bombardment. The economic consequences for France were severe. French Caribbean planters lost their primary labour supply pipeline, contributing directly to economic stagnation in Saint-Domingue during the war years. The gum trade, generating millions of livres annually for merchants in Rouen and Bordeaux, was redirected to British hands. The captures also illuminate the otherwise invisible foundation of eighteenth-century imperial warfare: the slave trade was not incidental to the Seven Years' War but structural to it. France recovered both posts at the Treaty of Paris (1763), though Senegal was lost again during the American Revolutionary War.
- Year: 1758 CE
- Category: Military
