1790, and 298 per 10,000 in 1800. Monetary confidence was briefly eroded by the disastrous paper money "System" introduced by John Law from 1716 to 1720. Law, as Controller General of Finances, established France's first central bank, the Banque Royale, initially founded as a private entity by Law in 1716 and nationalized in 1718. The bank was entrusted with paying down the enormous debt accumulated through Louis XIV's wars and stimulating the moribund French economy. Initially a great success, the bank's pursuit of French monopolies led it to land speculation in Louisiana through the Mississippi Company, forming an economic bubble in the process that eventually burst in 1720. The collapse of the Banque Royale in the crisis and the paper currency which it issued left a deep suspicion of the idea of a central bank; it was not until 80 years later that Napoleon established the Bank of France. In 1726, under Louis XV's minister Cardinal Fleury, a system of monetary stability was put in place, leading to a strict conversion rate between gold and silver, and set values for the coins in circulation in France. The amount of gold in circulation in the kingdom rose from 731 million livres in 1715 to 2 billion in 1788 as economic activity accelerated. The international commercial centers of the country were based in Lyon, Marseille, Nantes, and Bordeaux. Nantes and Bordeaux saw phenomenal growth due to an increase of trade with Spain and Portugal. Trade between France and her Caribbean colonies (Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe, and Martinique) grew ten-fold between 1715 and 1789, with Saint Domingue the single richest territory in the world by 1789. Much of the lucrative imports from the Caribbean were re-exported to other European countries. By the late 1780s, 87% of the sugar, 95% of the coffee, and 76% of the indigo imported to Bordeaux from the Caribbean was being re-exported. Cádiz was the commercial hub for export of French printed fabrics to India, the Americas and the Antilles (coffee, sugar, tobacco, American cotton), and Africa (the slave trade), centered in Nantes. The value of this export activity amounted to nearly 25% of the French national income by 1789. Industry continued to expand, averaging 2% growth per year from the 1740s onwards and accelerating in the last decades before the Revolution. The most dynamic industries of the period were mines, metallurgy, and textiles (in particularly printed fabrics, such as those