An African Prince in 1780s Saint-Domingue and Paris: Marc Boudakan and the Emergence of Scientific Racism in the French Atlantic

Abstract Marc Boudakan was an aristocrat from the kingdom of Warri (modern day Nigeria), who traveled to Saint-Domingue (modern day Haiti), France, and back home in 1783–1786 to receive a French education and promote the slave trade. Throughout his unusual triangular journey, he was greeted by French officials despite new laws formalizing racial prejudice. Boudakan's journey, and the many reactions it elicited from his white contemporaries, opens a window into the development of ‘scientific’ racism in the French Atlantic, which was still an ongoing process in the 1780s.