A summary of the triangular slave trade The triangular trade The slave trade began with Portuguese and some Spanish traders, taking mainly enslaved West African and some Central African people to the American colonies they had conquered in the 15th century.
For the British enslavers it was a three-legged journey called the 'triangular trade': British enslavers sailed from ports including Glasgow, Liverpool and Bristol to West Africa. It was there that West Africans were exchanged for trade goods such as brandy and guns.
As many as 2 million enslaved people died during the journey via the Middle Passage due to the terrible conditions on board the ships. Novel and instantly prized goods that only existed in the New World seemed to blink into existence: sugar, tobacco, hemp. European merchants could command high prices for selling these goods to other Europeans, just as New World merchants could command high prices from their customers for manufactured items from Europe.
The Triangular Trade
But a direct exchange of these goods, between Europe and the colonizers in the New World, required start-up money. Transporting goods by sea was not cheap. A solution to this economic problem appeared in the form of the transatlantic slave trade, which began operating as early as the 15th century, at the very beginning of the colonial period. European ships would travel to West Africa carrying manufactured goods to which Africans had no access: worked metal, certain types of clothing, weapons.
Once there, as payment they would demand people captured for slavery, who would be loaded onto crowded ships and transported to the Americas. This leg of the trade scheme is usually called the "Middle Passage," a term that has become a byword for suffering. Upon arrival, the enslaved Africans who survived the voyage were sold to landowners looking for cheap labor. With the money derived from these slave sales, European merchants would then purchase the cotton, sugar and tobacco their customers back home were demanding, and the cycle continued.
The triangular trade was not a route, but a strategy for making trade among distant markets easier and more profitable. At the same time, a different triangular trade route arose between New England, West Africa, and Central America and the Caribbean islands that lay east of it. As it happened, this process of navigation between Europe, Africa and the Americas fit in quite well with the prevailing economic theories on the purpose of colonies and international trade in the Early Modern Era.
The overwhelming majority of colonies in the New World were not designed to exist as their own self-sustaining communities, but to act as production facilities for raw materials, particularly cash crops grown on massive plantations in hotter climates like cotton, sugarcane, chocolate, tobacco and coffee. Once harvested and processed, these crops were then sold and shipped to Europe where they were processed into finished goods.
Explainer: What Was the Triangular Trade? | Antiques Roadshow | PBS
Finished products that went unconsumed, however, were shipped South to Africa in order to purchase slaves, which then were carried back to the New World colonies to continue the harvesting of cotton, sugarcane, chocolate, tobacco and coffee. But why all the way to Europe as the designated end point and as the center of production for finished goods? And why only to their own home countries? What prevented an English merchant from buying sugar in Dutch-ruled Aruba and selling it in Portuguese Brazil?
Using policies such as high tariffs on imported finished products, and sometimes simple bans on certain exports, the European powers saw any gain their neighbors made in trade to be their loss, and they applied this principle to their colonies as well.
Transatlantic trade
Most European colonies in the New World, especially cash crop producers, were completely banned from trading with either their colonial neighbors or European ports that did not belong to their mother countries. In Britain, this was done through legislation such as the Navigation Acts of , which completely banned foreign merchants from purchasing or selling goods in any English port. Customers gained access legally to foreign products solely through English merchants setting forth and purchasing those items themselves.
That said, one of the major weaknesses of Mercantilist thought was the sheer difficulty in enforcing the proposed policies, the large area of open ocean necessary to crack down on smuggling made it a profitable though risky enterprise, and that is assuming that customs officials were not nearly as vulnerable to bribery as they probably were. Still, the most reliable way for a country to gain access to a particular resource was to hold a colony that produced it. Because of this, the trade wars waged between the colonial powers often spun into actual wars over colonial holdings, and the acquisition and annexation of various colonies became a repeated trend in multiple 17th and 18th conflicts, even those that began in Europe.
The Mercantilist nature of the Triangular Trade also had a major impact on the function of the slave trade, in Africa, the New World, and in between. From their small enclaves in Africa, colonial powers worked hard to maintain a favorable balance of trade with the local African elites as with their European neighbors.
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As mentioned before, the usual items traded for slaves were finished products, to avoid spending as much gold or silver as possible. European weapons and munitions, too, were highly prized by the local kings and other rulers hoping to gain a military and political advantage over their rivals, as well as take new slaves as a result of the fighting. Enslavement was hardly a new concept to Africa when Europeans began exploring the region, mostly done to criminals and war captives.
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Increased European demand for slave labor, however, increased the number of people captured and sold whole sale to the slave ships. Ultimately, modern estimates place the number of people taken from Africa in chains between nine and twelve million between the 16th and 19th centuries.
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The finance ministers of Europe also subjected the slave trade to the same Exclusif-style regulations as their colonies. All major colonial powers in the Americas participated in the trade to some extent, but when looking at the records, slave traders overwhelmingly disembark at ports owned by the nation whose flag whose flag they flew. As the records show, however, there were many exceptions to this rule. The vast majority of these voyages disembarked at Caribbean, Central or South American ports.