Animal Mercantilism

Historians have spent nearly a century problematizing the concept of mercantilism, an anachronism not in widespread use before the late nineteenth century and first developed by critics of the supposed “mercantile system.”Footnote ¹⁸ Yet the term remains almost ubiquitous in the historical imagination of early modern economies. Many historians agree that mercantilism, even if it never constituted a coherent doctrine, fruitfully describes the early modern notion that a favorable balance of trade—meaning that more silver and gold enter than exit a country—was key to national power and economic plenty.Footnote ¹⁹ I here use the concept of “animal mercantilism” to characterize the early modern politicization of the transnational movement of animals and the materials they produced. In so doing, I follow Philip Stern and Carl Wennerlind’s suggestion that historians avoid all-encompassing definitions of mercantilism and instead “reimagine” the concept by examining its varied—and often conflicting—components to better illuminate early modern economic thought.Footnote ²⁰ Over this period, first horses and then sheep became increasingly subject to state governance, protectionist policies, and considerations related to national self-sufficiency. In Tudor England, for instance, legislators began to implement various breeding and export regulations aimed at ensuring the quantity and quality of their domestic stock.Footnote ²¹

At the same time, mercantilist theories of trade gradually took shape. In the first half of the seventeenth century, for example, Thomas Mun in England argued that “the ballance of forraign trade is the rule of our treasure.”Footnote ²² Meanwhile in France, Antoine de Montchrestien’s influential treatise on oeconomie politique primarily stressed self-sufficiency, deeming the country to be “so flourishing, so abundant in everything one could desire, that it has no need to borrow anything from its neighbors.” For Montchrestien, France possessed “five inexhaustible sources of natural wealth, … wheat, wine, salt, wool, linen,” which, in contrast to silver and gold mines, “last and renew themselves every year.”Footnote ²³ His ideal economy was thus built on self-generative primary materials, produced within its borders. From these and other writers, such as Joshua Gee in the early eighteenth century, an import-substitution ideal developed, in which foreign goods should be replaced by domestic alternatives.Footnote ²⁴

The need to import animals and their products was generally seen as a national weakness, and although animals were certainly among the resources that Montchrestien saw as self-renewing, they posed a problem in regard to France’s self-sufficiency. A widespread notion held that French horses and sheep were degenerated and lacked important qualities.Footnote ²⁵ Although it was possible to sustain their quantities through self-renewal, their insufficient quality rendered substituting imports with existing domestic resources ineffective. French breeders and state officials therefore, as I will show, turned to an alternative solution: domestic generation of foreign breeds that first needed to be imported in smaller quantities. Domesticated animals could be seen as both primary materials and producers of primary materials (including of new animals resembling themselves). Importations of animals were accordingly in some cases perceived analogously to a transfer of technology, with superior foreign breeds seen more as improved means of production (which a mercantilist state wished to attract) than as products (whose importation should be minimized). Animal importations for the sake of racial improvement thus became a question of political economy and governance.

From the 1660s, the Colbert administration in France established the royal stud, the Haras, whose purpose was to improve domestic stock by institutionalizing and controlling horse breeding in a manner that Daniel Roche has described as a “police of reproduction.”Footnote ²⁶ It has also been understood as the institutional foundation of what Claude-Olivier Doron termed “the animal roots of biopolitics,” whereby the state intervened directly in managing the “quality” of the population.Footnote ²⁷ The Haras developed an approach to the problem of international trade in horses that followed the seemingly paradoxical logic of animal mercantilism: to become independent from continuous imports, they first had to import. In 1666, Gabriel Calloet-Querbrat, Colbert’s advisor on animal breeding, wrote that the countries with the best horses in Europe had improved their stock through imports, and argued that France must follow suit. The idea was to acquire, breed, and disseminate a relatively small number of superior stallions in order to build an improved and plentiful population of horses. Then, when “the race of beautiful Horses is established in the Kingdom, we will no longer have to go and get them from our neighbors: they are not always our friends, the passages are not always free, no more money will leave the Kingdom on that account.”Footnote ²⁸ By importing large draft horses from northern Europe and fast saddle horses from North Africa, France hoped to achieve the self-sufficiency necessary for a favorable balance of trade. The English likewise strove to import the best stallions in order to boost their commercial and military power. Although English and French aristocrats occasionally exchanged breeding horses, Donna Landry has noted that in general the two countries’ shared interests in North African and Arabian horses developed alongside their imperial rivalry.Footnote ²⁹

After the horse, “the most noble conquest that man has ever made,” a more modest creature became the focal point of animal mercantilism in the second half of the eighteenth century.Footnote ³⁰ Despite its humble nature, Buffon described the sheep as “the most precious animal, … to which it seems that Nature, so to speak, has granted nothing of its own, nothing that is not for man.”Footnote ³¹ The economic significance of sheep is difficult to overstate. In France, as virtually everywhere in early modern Europe, textile production was the largest industry, and wool the dominant textile. The pervasive use of woolen cloth among lower social classes was gradually replaced by cotton and to some extent silk as these materials became cheaper over the eighteenth century, but a rising demand for fine woolen cloth among the upper classes (primarily replacing linen) still pushed the industry to grow.Footnote ³² At the end of the century, the wool industry constituted almost half of all French textile production, which in turn accounted for a third of the country’s total industrial production.Footnote ³³

In England and Spain, wool was even more important. In contrast to France, both these countries were famous for their production of fine fleeces that were increasingly in demand, and they adopted different approaches to profit from this wealth. For Spain, the exportation of high-quality raw wool was an essential trade; in order to protect it, the exportation of live sheep was completely banned. England went one step further, similarly prohibiting all exports of live sheep, but also trusting in an exclusively domestic manufacturing industry and banning all exports of raw wool between 1660 and 1824. In the late seventeenth century, Josiah Child penned the widely shared sentiment that “wool is eminently the foundation of the English riches” and “that therefore all possible means ought to be used to keep it within our own kingdom.”Footnote ³⁴ Manufactured woolens accounted for an astonishing 69 percent of England’s exports in 1700 and remained its most important export product throughout the eighteenth century.Footnote ³⁵ From the French perspective, the need to import expensive manufactured textiles from their principal rival was generally seen as disastrous for the balance of trade.

The exportation of English raw wool had been regulated since the late Middle Ages, creating a vibrant smuggling industry.Footnote ³⁶ In 1702, an anonymous writer claimed—undoubtedly with dramatic exaggeration—that the trafficking of wool to France deprived England of employment for 1.9 million people, or 35 percent of the population.Footnote ³⁷ In 1785, the former prime minister Lord Shelburne wrote, “if you were to ask a manufacturer of Halifax, for instance, what was the greatest crime upon earth, was it felony, was it murder, was it parricide? he would answer, no, none of these; it was the exporting of wool.”Footnote ³⁸ The wool smugglers, also known as “owlers” because they operated only at night, were infamous for their violent resistance when surprised by the authorities. Alluding to higher levels of international politics, a British report even claimed that the leaders of domestic smuggling gangs, who “acted behind the curtains,” “were well known not to be able to carry on such a work had they not been Supplied & Imploy’d by more powerfull Enemies to their Country.”Footnote ³⁹ In several periods, wool smuggling was punishable by death. The smuggling of live sheep was taken even more seriously and was consistently a capital crime. From 1737, during a period of intense smuggling across the English Channel, a pamphlet was circulated to remind Britons of the severe punishments offenders could face:

Acutely aware of the advantage to be gained from a monopoly on these valuable animals, the British authorities made sure to protect it. The situation was not much different in Spain, where sheep smuggling was similarly punishable by death. Such trade bans were one of the period’s strongest expressions of animal mercantilism. But there was also another side to the story: the French state’s attempts to circumvent them.

In the past decade, the historiography of smuggling has been revitalized by studies showing the essential role that the underground economy played in the formation of new global consumer markets in the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁴¹ Although these studies stress the role of smuggling in the process of state formation in a globalizing world, the activity has generally been treated merely as an internal conflict between contrebandiers and customs officers or other representatives of the state. As Anna Knutsson recently observed, “the new scholarship on smuggling has shown only a limited interest for smuggling as inter-state competition.”Footnote ⁴² Here I will trace an alternative narrative in which government officials themselves were a driving force behind smuggling, in attempts to steal the wealth of other nations.Footnote ⁴³

The cases that I discuss also provide other new perspectives on smuggling because although domesticated animals were treated as commodities, they differed in important ways from products such as tobacco, calico, or salt. To smugglers’ disadvantage, their contraband was willful and mobile, and could butt and baa in indiscrete ways. To their advantage, however, animals could reproduce. Live sheep constituted a commodity that would not simply be consumed and vanish, but whose value was enhanced by its potential to multiply and grow through future generations. Owing to this genetic capital, the trafficking of sheep even on a small scale could be seen as a way to enhance a country’s wealth by manipulating and improving the national population.

Race versus Climate

To understand how animal breeding and the transnational movement of sheep came to be governed in new ways in the 1760s, it is important to examine how the concepts of breed and race changed in the period. At the time, climate was generally perceived to be a, if not the, decisive factor in determining the nature of animals. Buffon, for instance, based his theory of degeneration—which explained variation within species for humans as well as domesticated and wild animals—primarily on the influence of climate. As Jacques Roger observed, Buffon thus saw climate as “the factor responsible for the diversity of living forms.”Footnote ⁴⁴ In relation to animal husbandry, he followed the idea, common among breeders, that North African, Arabian, and even Spanish horses would degenerate in the French climate, and that this process could only be prevented by continuous importations of new blood.Footnote ⁴⁵ The widespread view was that animal breeds were the result of climatic influence and would change, within a few generations, if brought to a new environment.Footnote ⁴⁶

In the second half of the eighteenth century, a number of French sheep breeders began to question the influence of climate. Sheep husbandry was immersed in a sort of nature-versus-nurture debate in which the pragmatics of breeding encountered intellectual understandings of animal nature. The question at stake was to what extent foreign breeds could be acclimatized and thrive in France. The debate took off following an essay contest on the topic of how to improve French wool, sponsored by intendant of finances Daniel-Charles Trudaine and announced by the Academy of Amiens in 1754. The prize was awarded to a text by Claude Carlier, which, after discussing the superiority of English and Spanish sheep, argued that the French climate did not cause the inferiority of the country’s herds. The essay further emphasized that it was “a demonstrated truth … that great advantages can be derived from the importation of a foreign race.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Carlier thus moved toward an understanding of breed and breeding that increasingly stressed the importance of race over climate.

Carlier’s position was initially criticized, and alternative views persisted.Footnote ⁴⁸ For instance, Louis de Jaucourt’s 1765 Encyclopédie article on wool suggested that England and Spain had superior breeds, pastures, and climates and concluded that “it is completely impossible for France to do without foreign wool.” Although Jaucourt claimed to concur in this regard “with the most enlightened people in this kingdom,” from the mid-1750s the debate had already started to pivot in favor of those who, like Carlier, argued that foreign animals could flourish on French soil and improve the nation’s wool.Footnote ⁴⁹ Carlier would find strong support for his views in the 1756 translation of a treatise on how Sweden had managed to acclimatize English and Spanish sheep in the early eighteenth century. This text stated that the “basis of the Swedish system consists mainly in the importation of a foreign race” and claimed that there “is absolutely no other way to improve sheep and conserve the good species.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Carlier considered this to be “an undeniable refutation” of the idea, proposed by some of his critics, that superior breeds of sheep were too sensitive to flourish in new climates.Footnote ⁵¹ In French discussions about sheep breeding, the Swedish case remained notorious, a ready refutation of any attempt to blame domestic failures on environmental factors.

How did such intellectual considerations shape the practical improvement projects launched in the 1760s? First of all, the idea that race was more important than climate was an essential starting point. For instance, the brothers Jacques-Michel Guerrier and Marie-Félix de Guerrier de Lormoy, two of the most prominent breeders in this context, consistently shaped their projects around this assumption. Following several trips to observe English horse breeding in the 1750s, Lormoy had concluded that “it was neither to the climate nor to the soil of their country that they owed their success, but to their intelligence and to the Arabian race which they had obtained and which they had multiplied to infinity.”Footnote ⁵² He consequently argued that it was necessary to import stallions as well as mares to keep this “first race” pure.Footnote ⁵³ He and his brother were convinced “that we will never succeed in France on this subject if we do not obtain other races, and the first races,” and claimed to be ready to pay whatever it took.Footnote ⁵⁴ As we will see, the brothers followed similar ideas when they turned to sheep breeding, frequently stressing the importance of race and breed to make their projects seem more feasible in their requests for patronage. Another contemporary breeder of English sheep, Michel de Noëttes-Groult in Cherbourg, similarly thought that “the species of the animal is the sole cause of the wool’s finesse.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Historians of animal breeding have argued that the term “breed” was introduced in British husbandry in the eighteenth century as “an ingenious marketing and publicity mechanism” to enhance the value of certain animals.Footnote ⁵⁶ A similar shift can be observed in the French term race, which the breeders discussed in this article frequently used to highlight the value of their animals. Their success lay in convincing potential clients and patrons that climate was not an obstacle, but that superior race was something deep and fundamental that context would not necessarily alter. Furthermore, they used “race” not only to market specific animals, but also in the more political sense of being able to transform a national population through government-backed initiatives.

In addition to the notion that foreign breeds could be introduced to the French climate without degenerating, a second idea was fundamental to the emergence of sheep breeding as a prominent form of animal mercantilism in the second half of the eighteenth century. This was that the French, by importing foreign breeds, could overcome the economic advantage that other countries possessed in their superior sheep. Several reports and letters written in support of Guerrier and Lormoy’s project indicated that this was not only a matter of benefiting a private business, but also an effort at racial improvement on the national scale that would allow France to compete with the British. One report emphasized that “in a few years we will be able to populate the different provinces with those animals which produce the most beautiful species of all kinds.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Gathering smuggled English breeds of horses and sheep, Guerrier’s farm in Saint-Martin-du-Vieux-Bellême, in the part of the Perche province that belonged to the generality of Alençon, was conceived as a model for national improvement and a nursery for superior bloodstock, which, “spread carefully to the provinces, would change and purify the races.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Guerrier reported that people were already traveling to his farm from far and wide to have their mares covered by his superior stallions and that he had sent twenty of his rams to Languedoc for a reduced price. The conclusion was that “If Sieur Guerrier can manage to multiply all these races, as he dares to hope, he will deal England the most significant blow.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Following the Seven Years’ War, Franco-British rivalry continued in the form of economic competition.Footnote ⁶⁰ Indeed, the smuggling and breeding of English sheep was often perceived as a form of commercial warfare in the 1760s and 1770s. We have already seen how Mante thought that a couple of dark nights would be enough for France to steal Britain’s “Golden Fleece” and populate the kingdom with its rival’s superior breeds. In 1778, a letter describing a similar project observed that the French, by raising English sheep, could “take away from an enemy nation the advantage that the superiority of its wool gives it.”Footnote ⁶¹ The plan of Noëttes-Groult, who was breeding smuggled English sheep in Normandy, was to “extract the three different species of rams and ewes which make up the wealth of this kingdom” and then, “having multiplied these species,” to “spread this true treasure throughout his homeland.”Footnote ⁶² The influential Trudaine family supported his project, and the intendant of the generality of Caen, who oversaw it, could not help enthusing to them “about the beauty of the herd of English sheep that Sr. des Noëttes-Groult … has acquired, and about the advantage that the government could draw from the industry and the intelligence of this individual to multiply this precious species in the kingdom.”Footnote ⁶³ This sort of reasoning—which always proved to be much more complicated in practice—perfectly illustrates the logic of animal mercantilism and the geopolitics of genetic capital.

The Bureau of (Illicit) Commerce

Economic historians studying the dynamics of the eighteenth-century wool trade have emphasized how manufacturing methods changed to meet demands for finer wool.Footnote ⁶⁴ Very little attention has, however, been paid to concurrent attempts to improve the sheep population. Colbert had tried to improve the French stock by encouraging the smuggling of sheep from Spain and England in the 1660s and 1670s.Footnote ⁶⁵ A century later, in the 1760s, the French state initiated more consistent attempts to alter the balance of power around wool production. Until then, few had seriously considered it possible for the fine-wool manufacturing industry to break free of its dependence on primary materials legally imported from Spain or illicitly smuggled from England. In the last third of the century, however, French state officials turned their attention toward the source of that wool: the sheep themselves.

Within the French state, the agency that drove the politicization of sheep husbandry from the 1760s was the Bureau of Commerce. Its director, the intendant of finances Trudaine, and his son Philibert Trudaine de Montigny, who succeeded him after his death in 1769, were the foremost instigators and patrons of sheep-improvement projects in the eighteenth century. The Bureau of Commerce had been created in 1700 as an administrative body to oversee and regulate all commerce, modeled upon the ideal figure of Colbert. It operated within the office of the controller-general of finances, with whom it worked closely, and although it lost some areas of authority over time, it maintained its position as the state organ that dealt most extensively with French industry. The bureau was a prominent actor in industrial espionage and led several attempts to steal knowledge and technology from Britain.Footnote ⁶⁶ It also collaborated with a wide range of actors and supported numerous savants, many of them members of the Academy of Sciences, who made expert contributions intended to be disseminated to the provinces. As Philippe Minard has remarked, Trudaine father and son used the Bureau of Commerce to build “a real brain trust, a formidable team of improvers in the service of economic and technological progress.”Footnote ⁶⁷

The Trudaines’ most famous and influential scientific collaboration in ovine matters was their recruitment of the naturalist Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton, who, in 1766, entered the government’s pay to conduct experiments “on the improvement of the race of sheep.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Daubenton was asked “to research, through a series of well-designed and carefully executed experiments, the most favorable disposition of nature for the improvement of wools.”Footnote ⁶⁹ He had responded positively when first approached by the Trudaines about the possibility of improving the nature of animals in this way, remarking that “the state of domesticity had sufficed to turn the hair of the moufflon, which is the wild ram, into Spanish wool.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Consequently, Daubenton would later recall, “the observations that I had long carried out of métis races of domestic animals, made me think that, by a good selection of rams and sheep as mating partners, one could make their wool finer and longer.”Footnote ⁷¹ Sheep were imported from England, Spain, Morocco, and Tibet for his cross-breeding experiments, which he pursued over several decades. In 1782, Daubenton published his results in the Instruction pour les bergers, a book that he hoped would serve as a sheep-raising catechism for the rural population.Footnote ⁷²

The Bureau of Commerce also mobilized a significant number of less well-known sheep breeders from diverse backgrounds. From the 1760s, the Trudaines built a network of sheep improvers who, to various extents, were supported by central and regional administrations. Daubenton’s experiments thus relied on the much less recognized work of breeders around the country, from whom he received both knowledge and rare sheep breeds. He especially benefited from individual initiatives to import sheep of foreign and hard-to-acquire breeds, including by illicit means. Import-based sheep-improvement projects flourished in particular on the northwestern coast of Normandy and Brittany, where proximity to the English Channel provided fertile ground for the smuggling and breeding of English sheep.

While some breeders were wealthy landowners who saw agricultural improvement as a patriotic pastime, many hoped that their breeding projects would help them climb the social ladder. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the primary aspiration for a number of prominent breeders was to obtain a concession that would allow them to expand or relocate their operations, without having to rent or purchase the land. In the 1770s, the breeder François Delporte, for instance, requested state support in the form of land and funds in order to establish a herd of a thousand ewes and fifty rams of English breed that he would raise following English methods in Boulogne-sur-Mer near Calais. Another more colorful example was that of the double agent turned breeder Mante, with which this article opened. Mante published a book about his experiences of breeding English sheep in 1778, though his own business had done nothing more than land him in a debtors’ prison that same year.Footnote ⁷³ For others, sheep improvement did actually afford upward social mobility. The Trudaines helped a number of breeders to access land and cash compensation for their projects, and Delporte was even ennobled for his contributions to sheep improvement in 1776 (recognition that he in turn used as leverage in new requests for state support).Footnote ⁷⁴

Channel Trade at Dusk

How were these projects, which would help France prevail over its archrival Britain, actually carried out? To illustrate the practical details, I examine one of the first projects for smuggling English sheep supported by the Bureau of Commerce, that of the abovementioned brothers Guerrier and Lormoy in the Perche province. They came from a family of merchants and administrators of the widely detested but highly profitable gabelle salt tax. The older brother, Guerrier, worked for a handful of years in a trading company active in Spain and the French colonies, but both siblings soon developed an interest in horse breeding.Footnote ⁷⁵ Around 1749, at the age of about twenty, Lormoy was hired by the French government to travel to North Africa to transport stallions for the Haras. After his return to France, he was sent together with his brother to England to source horses for the king’s Petite Écurie, one of the stables at Versailles. Impressed by the horses, cattle, and sheep that they saw, the brothers began to inquire into the English success with livestock. Hearing that the superior English breeding establishments were of relatively recent foundation, they concluded that it would be possible for France to emulate its rival. Guerrier, supported by his brother, decided to establish his own business in Saint-Martin-du-Vieux-Bellême. They made several prospecting trips to England, and in 1760 they succeeded in smuggling a “quite large quantity of sheep” into France.Footnote ⁷⁶

In 1764, Guerrier wrote to the controller-general asking for “encouragements” for his breeding projects. He especially hoped for a concession of untilled land in the duchy of Châteauroux, in the province of Berry, where he wished to transfer his establishment.Footnote ⁷⁷ The request was supported by the king’s equerry (premier écuyer du roi) Henri-Camille, marquis de Beringhen, who sent a report on the superiority of English sheep that Trudaine de Montigny received and read with great interest. In the report, Beringhen emphasized the importance of breed, claiming that “it is not to the climate that England and Spain owe the beauty and finesse [of their wool], it is only to the sort of animal which produces it.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Trudaine de Montigny undertook a thorough review of the potential of the brothers’ establishment. For most provincial matters, the Bureau of Commerce relied on the network of generality intendants, the highest regional officials in France. After conferring with the controller-general François de L’Averdy, Trudaine de Montigny asked Lallemant de Lévignen, the intendant of the generality of Alençon, to submit a report and send a delegation to inspect the brothers’ farm. The intendant accordingly dispatched his subdelegate in Bellême, René Charles de Lauye, and a local Haras official by the name of Rocher to Guerrier’s premises. Both Lévignen and the delegation submitted very favorable reports to the controller-general. The inspectors were greatly impressed by the brothers’ English horses of Arabian descent and their flock of about a hundred sheep “of the most beautiful sort in the world, coming from English race.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Another report supporting Guerrier emphasized that it was not the climate that caused imported races to decline but rather that the “best races degenerate when we do not make sure to preserve them.” The English had managed to develop their successful woolen industry thanks to “the taste that [they] have acquired for the beautiful races and due to the sums they have spent to acquire them.”Footnote ⁸⁰

The reports must have convinced Trudaine de Montigny of the superiority of English sheep, because instead of granting Guerrier the land that he wanted, the government official encouraged him to smuggle even more animals. In 1766, the king approved a gratuity of 3,000 livres annually for ten years (half from the Royal Treasury and half from the Fund of Commerce) to Guerrier, who, in exchange, promised to import 270 sheep from Lincolnshire to establish a new herd of English race.Footnote ⁸¹ Lincolnshire sheep were famed for their great size and long wool, although contemporary British observers did not consider their fleece to be among the finer sorts. Nonetheless, the breed had spread to many parts of Britain, including Scotland, and the prominent agricultural writer Arthur Young reported that Robert Bakewell, often considered the father of modern selective breeding, had originally taken his famous sheep breed from Lincolnshire before improving it in Dishley, Leicestershire.Footnote ⁸² Even more important for the French was probably Lincolnshire’s east-coast location, which facilitated the planned extraction.

The Anglo-French maritime border swarmed with illicit trade, as smugglers used both small boats and larger ships to primarily run tea, tobacco, spirits, and textiles from France to England, and raw wool in the opposite direction, taking great pains to evade customs officers.Footnote ⁸³ Trudaine de Montigny, Guerrier, and Lormoy began plotting a project that sat at the intersection of diplomacy, commerce, and, most of all, smuggling. Trudaine de Montigny charged Jacques Batailhe de Francès, the French minister plenipotentiary to London, with coordinating the plan in England. On some occasions, Guerrier personally delivered secret correspondence between the two French officials. Their plan was to purchase a number of sheep in Boston, a market town and inland port in Lincolnshire, and bring them across the Channel to France. Francès saw two alternatives for carrying out the operation: either they could assign both the purchase of the sheep in Boston and their removal to France to a smuggler, or they could first commission a local merchant in Boston to buy the sheep and then have a smuggler handle the transportation. He preferred the second option as it allowed them to find a knowledgeable and trustworthy procurer who would not try to cheat them on the quality of the sheep. Francès reasoned that “the entire expense is almost lost if we are not assured that [the buyer] will choose the sort that you desire and that it is so advantageous for you to propagate” in France.Footnote ⁸⁴

Finding the right agents was the first step. The merchant had to be intelligent, well-known locally, and qualified to select the best sheep. He would also pasture the sheep as near as possible to the coast while awaiting the arrival of the smuggler. In the end they appointed a man, unnamed in the sources, who was said to run Boston’s main trading company. Involving this merchant presented other difficulties, as he had to be kept unaware of his clients’ real intentions. To cloak the involvement of the French state, Francès communicated with him through an intermediary. The conspirators also managed to find a “hardy and intelligent” English smuggler who awaited their orders in Dunkirk, on the French side of the Channel. It was a delicate affair with many potential pitfalls, and they were well aware of the “risk of the lambs being seized at the time of embarkation.” On the other hand, Francès observed, it was “in the interest of the broker, who hopes for a very large commission, and the smuggler navigator, who risks his life, to take the greatest precautions to ensure the success of the shipment.”Footnote ⁸⁵

Despite these precautions, the operation ran into difficulties. It was first postponed for a month from April 1768, and then, when the smuggler had crossed the Channel from Dunkirk and was ready to pick up the sheep, the Boston merchant suddenly broke off communication with both London and the smuggler. Although the smuggler was determined to fulfill his risky side of the bargain, he was forced to return to Dunkirk empty-handed. Francès wrote to Trudaine de Montigny that he suspected that the merchant had been “intimidated by the fear of the season being too advanced, the nights being very short and not very favorable to our operation,” and expected further delays.Footnote ⁸⁶ Trudaine de Montigny regretted the setback, but acknowledged that the peculiarities of the operation implied a level of uncertainty; as the intendant of finances pragmatically noted, “you have to conform to the ways of smugglers if you want to be one yourself.”Footnote ⁸⁷

Although Trudaine de Montigny was ready to adapt to smugglers’ customs, the Boston merchant turned out to have cold feet and pretended “not to have understood the nature of the affair itself.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Considering that the merchant had been instructed to keep the sheep as close to the coast as possible, Francès distrusted his claims to naive ignorance. After the merchant wrote a threatening letter to their intermediary in London, the group decided to abandon that option altogether and seek out alternatives. Instead of engaging an English merchant, Francès now considered it necessary to send someone from France to Lincolnshire to handle the purchase. It was potentially a safer approach, but he expected the expense to increase considerably, owing to the lack of local commercial connections. Short of options, Trudaine de Montigny sent Guerrier to England. He first arrived in the fall of 1768, but even though he managed to find a ship and crew to carry sheep across the Channel, the operation failed once again for reasons that remain unclear.Footnote ⁸⁹

The plan was finally realized in the following year, with Guerrier and Lormoy in central roles. In February 1769, Guerrier outsourced part of the mission to the merchant-sailor-smuggler Jean-François Guitton in Dunkirk, signing an agreement that made Guitton responsible for acquiring the sheep and transporting them from Lincolnshire.Footnote ⁹⁰ The up-front payment of 17,000 livres forced Guerrier to ask the controller-general for an advance on his gratuities. It was granted on the condition that he would deliver 150 sheep of English race before July 1769, or else repay the full amount.Footnote ⁹¹ Once again, however, the operation was delayed, first by unfavorable winds and then, in June, because of “the brevity of the nights.”Footnote ⁹² Guerrier asked Trudaine de Montigny for an extension until October, which, despite the latter’s growing frustration, he approved.

Finally, in the darkness of late October 1769, Guitton managed to remove 169 sheep, including 10 rams, from the Lincolnshire coast. The archival record omits the details, but one can assume that the sizeable flock must have been discretely ferried in small boats from remote or hidden landings to reach the larger ship that brought it to France. An Englishman who fittingly was both a captain and a butcher oversaw the sheep’s transport from Lincolnshire to Dunkirk. After eight days of sailing in harsh weather conditions, they arrived safely on November 6. Lormoy, who had been waiting in Dunkirk for almost a month, met the ship on arrival and was able to report that the sheep were in very good condition after all. Using a local sheep to guide the newly arrived English flock, Lormoy and a few shepherds brought the animals on foot to Guerrier’s farm in Perche, a journey that must have taken at least a couple of weeks.Footnote ⁹³

The affair turned out to be an expensive one. Following the agreement between Guerrier and Guitton, the latter was paid five and a half louis, the equivalent of 132 livres, for each of the 169 sheep he had acquired, a price two times higher than originally estimated. Including some additional expenses, the sheep’s purchase and transportation ultimately cost 26,489 livres and 17 sols, or more than 150 livres per head.Footnote ⁹⁴ In the following years, Guerrier and Lormoy continued to breed the English flock at their farm. Despite some initial difficulties, in 1774 Guerrier reported to Trudaine de Montigny that “my herd is perfectly recovered, it increases every year and I have reason to hope that it will soon be flourishing better than ever.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Like many similar projects in the period, however, this breeding program never succeeded in scaling up consistently. In hindsight, English imports seem to have had only a marginal influence on the general population of sheep in France. The importation of Spanish sheep, to which I turn next, received greater institutional support and achieved an increasing and long-lasting impact.

Spain’s Golden Sheep

As in England, wool production constituted an essential part of the Spanish economy and was protected through strict trade regulations. For the French, there was, however, a significant difference: Spain was (most of the time) an ally rather than an enemy. Following the demise of the Spanish Habsburg monarchy in 1700 and the subsequent coronation of King Philip V, the grandson of Louis XIV, Franco-Spanish international politics became a Bourbon family affair. Except for the War of the Quadruple Alliance (1718–1720), the countries were military allies until the French Revolution. From 1733, their diplomatic collaboration was formalized through three pactes de famille (family compacts), of which the last, signed in 1761, pulled Spain into the Seven Years’ War.Footnote ⁹⁶ Historians have shown that Spanish willingness to offer trade privileges to the French decreased following their defeat in that conflict. Some have even argued that an “economic war” ensued between the two countries, as Spain sought to regain power independently from its ally.Footnote ⁹⁷ The French commercial position in Spain nonetheless persisted, and certain French officials were optimistic about their chances of importing Spanish sheep through diplomatic agreements. As we will see, they met with greater difficulties than expected.

Wool production was one of the pillars of Spain’s late medieval and early modern economy. For centuries, Spanish sheep husbandry had been highly organized and regulated through the Mesta, a powerful livestock owners’ association under royal protection, which primarily enabled the country’s considerable system of transhumance by granting privileged access to pastures and routes of passage. In the eighteenth century, the Mesta faced widespread criticism, and some of its privileges were consequently withdrawn. Nonetheless, wool exports—which were allowed despite protests from manufacturers—continued to form an essential part of the Spanish economy; both wool producers and merchants made record profits during the peak of trade between the 1740s and the 1780s.Footnote ⁹⁸ The Franco-Spanish wool trade was a two-way street. French manufacturers of high-quality textiles relied heavily on imports of superfine raw wool from Spain, but, in price competition with the British, they also sold manufactured woolens back to Spain to be exported to its colonies.Footnote ⁹⁹

Livestock exports had been unlawful in Spain since 1404, and, as in England, offenders risked capital punishment. According to an intendant of the French generality of Auch on the Spanish border—who himself had been involved in smuggling Spanish sheep in 1775—people were well aware of “the mortal danger to which one is exposed if caught trying to bring [Spanish rams] out of the country without permission.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The British, who were also involved in efforts to import merinos, were likewise subject to these restrictions. In 1766–1767, for instance, the former Whig prime minister the second marquess of Rockingham ordered a certain Thomas Lodge to procure “a breed of the finest woolled Spanish sheep,” but the export bans and the “severe penalty” involved prevented Lodge’s correspondent in Malaga from carrying out the mission.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Over the eighteenth century, the Spaniards became increasingly willing to let go of their fine merino sheep, while other countries intensified their attempts to acquire them. This shift partly resulted from changing understandings of heredity, which varied in different parts of Europe. While many French writers, as we have seen, increasingly emphasized the primacy of race over climate, the Spanish became more firmly convinced that the merino could only flourish in their own environment, and thus more inclined to make diplomatic exceptions to their export bans. In the eighteenth century, merinos were consequently shipped off to Sweden (1723), Saxony (1765), and Austria (1775), among other places.Footnote ¹⁰² Following its defeat in the American Revolutionary War, the British Crown also developed a sustained program for improving the country’s domestic stock by importing Spanish breeds. The up-and-coming naturalist Pierre Marie Auguste Broussonet, who was a protégé of both Daubenton and Joseph Banks, the president of the Royal Society, acted as an intermediary between the two men, enabling Banks to receive a few Spanish sheep from Daubenton’s experimental breeding farm in Montbard. Subsequent imports directly from Spain, through smuggling and diplomacy, allowed Banks to found His Majesty’s flock of merino sheep, which he directed over several decades starting in 1787.Footnote ¹⁰³ In 1799, the agronomist Charles-Philibert de Lasteyrie du Saillant, convinced that “fine-wool breeds can be raised wherever there are industrious cultivators,” would write that “all the nations of Europe seem set on conspiring to take away from Spain the most lucrative branch of its commerce. The moment is likely not far away when this nation will lose the considerable profits that she has until now made from it.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Heightened geopolitical stakes thus surrounded different understandings of animals, heredity, and climate and the varying positions on commercial exchange supported by these interpretations.

Although diplomatic arrangements would eventually open up the trade in sheep, it all started with smuggling. The movement of contraband across the Pyrenean frontier was generally perceived to be a major problem by both the French and the Spanish governments. They often collaborated to prevent it, but of course, as Peter Sahlins has noted, “it was not always in the interest of the two crowns to cooperate in the repression of smuggling.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Sheep smuggling was certainly one such case. As mentioned, it had already been encouraged by Colbert in the seventeenth century. In 1721, an influential agricultural manual stated that there were sheep of Spanish breed in many parts of France and suggested that with sustained efforts it would be possible to “establish the race everywhere.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In the 1750s, Jean-Baptiste Jérôme Bruny, baron de La Tour d’Aigues, a Provence nobleman with a famous menagerie of exotic animals, illicitly imported several lots of Spanish sheep for his experimental breeding projects.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In 1763, during the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, the regional official Antoine Mégret d’Étigny managed to bring a “considerable flock of rams and ewes of the best race” from Estremadura to Auch, where he served as intendant.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ He subsequently carried out various cross-breeding experiments and disseminated the breed through personal and institutional networks. Among the recipients were the statesman Turgot, the Paris Agricultural Society, and the Alfort Veterinary School.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ After Étigny’s death in 1767, his widow carried on the mission and continued to distribute portions of the Spanish flock to other breeders. One of them was Léon-François de Barbançois, an aristocrat in the Berry province, who received three Spanish rams and allegedly managed to greatly improve the quality of wool produced by his local flock.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Reports of the cross-breeding experiments of both Bruny and Barbançois reached Trudaine, and their successes sparked his interest in Spanish sheep.Footnote ¹¹¹ Another factor was the unpredictability of international politics and trade, as Trudaine feared that the Spanish would establish their own manufactures and (like the British) refuse to export the fine wool on which French industries so heavily relied.Footnote ¹¹² He therefore hoped to be able to meet industrial demand for fine wool by breeding Spanish sheep domestically. Considering the alliances between France and Spain and the frequent exchange of animals as diplomatic gifts in the early modern period, it was not unreasonable to believe that the Spanish Crown would be willing to make a (literally) cousinly exception to their export ban on sheep.Footnote ¹¹³ Animal mercantilism and diplomacy would, however, turn out to be more complicated than expected.

Sheep Diplomacy

To secure Spanish sheep—primarily intended for Daubenton’s experiments—the Trudaines contacted l’abbé Beliardi, France’s agent in charge of commercial and naval affairs in Madrid. In 1768, the project developed into a collaboration with Anne Pierre, duc d’Harcourt, a former high-ranking military officer and aristocrat in Normandy, who had engaged Beliardi for the same purpose. Beliardi suggested to Trudaine de Montigny that they raise the project’s ambitions, aiming for a flock of a thousand sheep with a suitable proportion of rams of the best sort. He was confident that the Spanish king would grant them the necessary passports, and considered this a good occasion for the controller-general to distribute Spanish sheep throughout France.Footnote ¹¹⁴

A grand plan to maximize the improvement to French stock quickly took shape. A list of people who would receive the sheep was drawn up: three hundred would go to Harcourt, and significant numbers to other landowners and regional officials. Several were intendants of generalities prominent in sheep husbandry and wool production—including Turgot in Limoges and Nicolas Dupré de Saint-Maur in Bourges—who were to distribute the animals to carefully selected local breeders and farmers “to renew the species.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Logistics for the vast flock’s transport were also considered. It would be brought by Spanish shepherds to Perpignan, and received there by the intendant of Roussillon. A shepherd named Jérôme Camy, who had already brought Roussillon sheep to Daubenton, would be waiting to lead the herd safely to Limoges, Berry, and Montbard, whence they would be further dispersed to eager improvers.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In Normandy, Harcourt had conducted preparatory experiments with a Spanish ram already in his possession, which had produced offspring with impressive wool. He impatiently awaited the arrival of the large Spanish flock, for which he had reserved his finest pasture lands the whole summer.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In Montbard, Daubenton hoped that the flock would provide the missing piece for his experiments, in which he had already cross-bred a number of foreign and domestic sheep from various locations.Footnote ¹¹⁸

But a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and it turned out that Beliardi had gravely underestimated the diplomatic task. By October 1768, the difficulty of obtaining the passports forced the collaborators to pause the operation, though they still hoped to carry it out the following spring.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Turgot, also eagerly awaiting the flock’s arrival, decided to seek his own information about the situation. A few months earlier, he had started to correspond with a merchant by the name of Lalanne, who was in charge of a trading house specialized in the importation of Spanish wool, and whose responses challenged Beliardi’s optimism. Lalanne told Turgot that he was aware of certain successful efforts to extract sheep from Spain, but only illicit ones requiring long detours to avoid the Spanish authorities. He did not exclude the possibility that the Spanish Crown might accept a request from the French ambassador to Madrid, Pierre Paul, marquis d’Ossun, but he doubted that the extremely careful d’Ossun would ask for such a bold favor. Besides, he did not believe that the sheep would flourish outside the Spanish climate and local transhumance system.

Lalanne’s primary advice was that in order to obtain passports, Turgot’s collaborators should conceal the operation’s actual objectives. The reason was tensions in the Spanish court, which he described as “a sort of internal war between ministers.”Footnote ¹²⁰ The principal issue at stake was the production of fine wool. Some ministers blamed it for the poor state of Spanish agriculture, especially because of the Mesta privileges, long protected by the Crown, which carved out extensive routes with access to sweeping pastures for large flocks. At the Spanish court, the critique of the Mesta system was led by the influential ministers Pedro Rodríguez, count of Campomanes, and Juan Gregorio Muniain, who argued that a growing population demanded more arable land, and therefore by necessity less herding.Footnote ¹²¹ They nonetheless met strong resistance, and Lalanne described how their opponents had spread the rumor that these ministers were serving foreign powers who wanted access to the sheep themselves. “It seems to me,” he wrote, “that in these circumstances, a request for a permission for the extraction of sheep and rams would strengthen the public opinion” that foreign interests were involved.Footnote ¹²²

In such a delicate situation, the French needed a plausible story. Instead of a state-run geopolitical operation, they had to make the project appear harmlessly naive. Lalanne advised:

In Turgot’s view, this letter from Lalanne was a gamechanger, and he forwarded it to his close friend Trudaine de Montigny. As a request made through Beliardi would surely be suspected of coming directly from the French government, Turgot thought it better to follow Lalanne’s advice and hide behind a private individual. He suggested that Louise Élisabeth de La Rochefoucauld, duchesse d’Enville, could be a suitable intermediary. In this period, female ownership of animals was often understood in terms of a vain culture of curiosity and wasteful consumption, so perhaps he thought that a woman would be perceived as more innocent in diplomatic matters.Footnote ¹²⁴ It is unclear whether Trudaine de Montigny and Turgot proceeded with the alternative plan, but the operation never led to any Spanish sheep crossing the border into France. It is possible that they had already lost their chance of outsmarting the Spanish government by making a first official request through Beliardi, who, in contrast to the wool merchant Lalanne, seemed to be ignorant of the high political stakes. In either case, the failure of this project illustrates the geopolitical sensitivity of the trade in sheep and wool.

In the end, the French would find other means to achieve their goal. The first successful importation of Spanish sheep carried out by the central government took place almost a decade later, in 1776, when the Bayonne banker François de Batbedat, following the orders of Trudaine de Montigny and Turgot, smuggled 30 rams and 175 ewes into France.Footnote ¹²⁵ To determine the best route, Trudaine gathered information from knowledgeable people. One report suggested that the best sheep were from León and overwintered in Estremadura, and that a small number could be brought by ship from Santander. A large flock would have to be brought on foot through the free passage from Castile to Aragon, and then to the town of Ansó in the Pyrenees, “from where, with the help of a few small gratuities, they will be smuggled into France.”Footnote ¹²⁶ When the plan was carried out, the sheep were shipped to Bayonne from Suances, and bribes to local officers and guards amounted to 13,000 reales de vellón (around 3,345 livres), surpassing the price of the sheep themselves and representing about a third of the total cost of the operation.Footnote ¹²⁷ The living contraband, which quickly multiplied because Batbedat had made sure to bring pregnant ewes to accelerate the flock’s growth in France, was distributed to a number of improvers, including Trudaine de Montigny and Daubenton.

A decade later again, French efforts to acclimatize Spanish sheep would culminate with the creation of the Bergerie nationale de Rambouillet, the national sheep-breeding farm, inaugurated in 1786. This time, the establishment’s famous merino flock originated in a diplomatic agreement between the Bourbon kings of France and Spain. The importation of 366 sheep of the highest quality marked the beginning of the mérinisation of France, the process through which the merino breed was widely disseminated throughout the nation.Footnote ¹²⁸ A further step was taken in 1795 when the Peace of Basel, signed by France and Spain to end the War of the Pyrenees, included a secret clause that allowed France to extract a thousand female sheep and a hundred rams of merino breed for five consecutive years.Footnote ¹²⁹

Finally, it is important to note that despite the French belief in the primacy of race, acclimatization to a new environment and new customs often proved challenging. In Spain, the practice of transhumance was a foundational part of the Mesta system. The French lacked comparable traditions and infrastructure, and many of the imported Spanish sheep sickened or perished. The transfer of knowledge was as essential as the acquisition of the animals; the flock that Étigny imported in 1764, for example, initially suffered great losses and only survived because he hired an experienced Pyrenean shepherd who took the sheep to the mountains in the summer.Footnote ¹³⁰ Scientific approaches to breeding also had their limitations. Daubenton insisted on the importance of fresh air and gave orders for his Spanish sheep to be kept outside in all seasons. It was, however, later revealed that Daubenton’s shepherd “during his master’s winter stay in Paris, would, out of pity, shut in his sheep and rams at that time of year, and let him believe that he always kept them outside.”Footnote ¹³¹ The shepherd’s intimate knowledge of the sheep and his compassionate disobedience saved the flock from otherwise inevitable losses. Both Carlier and Daubenton, two of the strongest proponents of the importation of foreign breeds in the 1750s and 1760s, reconsidered their views in light of subsequent experiences and shifted their attention to improving French domestic sheep by introducing new husbandry methods.Footnote ¹³² Race and climate remained contested concepts.

Owing to vibrant new scholarship, we know considerably more today than we did a decade ago about how sheep breeding developed as a central scientific and political project in the decades following the French Revolution.Footnote ¹³³ As this article has shown, the politicization of livestock breeding and the commodification of animal breeds already took a particular form in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, characterized here as animal mercantilism. In the context of this period’s interstate rivalries, state officials and naturalists, in collaboration with a wide range of other actors, began to treat animal breeds as natural resources worthy of national political protection and governance.

Reappraising this historical development has required an integrative approach that resists tendencies of disciplinary fragmentation. This article has combined perspectives from the history of science with political, economic, cultural, and transnational history to demonstrate how projects of animal political economy developed alongside assumptions about the relative fixity of race and breed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Attempts to reshape national populations of animals built on the idea that genetic or racial capital was a resource that could be transferred across environments and significant geographical distances. It is important to remember that, in the eighteenth century, it was not assumed that the Spanish merino could flourish in the French climate, nor was it self-evident that the breed would reach its subsequent status in France. In fact, the concept of the “merino” itself only came into regular usage in French in the years around 1800.Footnote ¹³⁴ The shift from breed descriptions based on locality—often as wide as “English” or “Spanish”—to alternative classifications arguably reflects the increasing emphasis on race over environment examined in this article and deserves further study. These processes can be understood as a first step toward the ensuing standardization, homogenization, and specialization of livestock breeds across Europe and beyond, a transformation that increasingly prioritized monoculture over local variation in the pursuit of productivity.Footnote ¹³⁵ Without representing a straightforward march toward this development, overlooked historical figures like Mante, Guerrier, and Lormoy illustrate how eighteenth-century breeders, interacting with major political and scientific figures, began to conceptualize animal breeds as strategic economic resources, subject to new forms of political governance amid imperial competition.