Triangular trade
Triangular trade or triangle trade is
The
During the Age of Sail, the particular routes were also shaped by the powerful influence of winds and currents. For example, from the main trading nations of Western Europe, it was much easier to sail westwards after first going south of 30° N latitude and reaching the so-called "trade winds", thus arriving in the Caribbean rather than going straight west to the North American mainland. Returning from North America, it was easiest to follow the Gulf Stream in a northeasterly direction using the westerlies. (Even before the voyages of Christopher Columbus, the Portuguese had been using a similar triangle to sail to the Canary Islands and the Azores, and it was then expanded outwards.)
The countries that controlled the transatlantic slave market until the 18th century in terms of the number of enslaved people shipped were the United Kingdom, Portugal, and France.
Atlantic triangular slave trade
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The most historically significant triangular trade was the
A classic example is the colonial molasses trade. Merchants purchased raw sugar (often in its liquid form, molasses) from plantations in the Caribbean and shipped it to New England and Europe, where it was sold to distillery companies that produced rum. Merchant capitalists used cash from the sale of sugar to purchase rum, furs, and lumber in New England which their crews shipped to Europe. With the profits from the European sales, merchants purchased Europe's manufactured goods, including tools and weapons and on the next leg, shipped those manufactured goods, along with the American sugar and rum, to West Africa where they bartered the goods for slaves seized by local potentates. Crews then transported the slaves to the Caribbean and sold them to sugar plantation owners. The cash from the sale of slaves in Brazil, the Caribbean islands, and the American South was used to buy more raw materials, restarting the cycle. The full triangle trip took a calendar year on average, according to historian Clifford Shipton.[11]
The first leg of the triangle was from a European port to one in West Africa (then known as the "
On the second leg, ships made the journey of the Middle Passage from Africa to the New World. Many slaves died of disease in the crowded holds of the slave ships. Once the ship reached the New World, enslaved survivors were sold in the Caribbean or the American colonies. The ships were then prepared to get them thoroughly cleaned, drained, and loaded with export goods for a return voyage, the third leg, to their home port,[15] from the West Indies the main export cargoes were sugar, rum, and molasses; from Virginia, tobacco and hemp. The ship then returned to Europe to complete the triangle.
The triangle route was not generally followed by individual ships. Slave ships were built to carry large numbers of people, rather than cargo, and variations in the duration of the Atlantic crossing meant that they often arrived in the Americas out-of-season. Slave ships thus often returned to their home port carrying whatever goods were readily available in the Americas but with a large part or all of their capacity with ballast.[16][17] Cash crops were transported mainly by a separate fleet which only sailed from Europe to the Americas and back.[18] In his books, Herbert S. Klein has argued that in many fields (cost of trade, ways of transport, mortality levels, earnings and benefits of trade for the Europeans and the "so-called triangular trade"), the non-scientific literature portrays a situation which the contemporary historiography refuted a long time ago.[19]
Finally, even if the "triangle trade" idea is essentially incorrect, the Atlantic slave trade was one of the more complex of international trades that existed in the modern period. (…) Thus, while an actual "triangle trade" may not have existed as a significant development for ships in the trade, the economic ties between Asia, Europe, Africa, and America clearly involved a web of relationships that spanned the globe.[20]
A 2017 study provides evidence for the hypothesis that the export of gunpowder to Africa increased the transatlantic slave trade: "A one percent increase in gunpowder set in motion a 5-year gun-slave cycle that increased slave exports by an average of 50%, and the impact continued to grow over time."[21]
New England
New England also made rum from Caribbean sugar and molasses, which it shipped to Africa as well as within the New World.[22] Yet, the "triangle trade" as considered in relation to New England was a piecemeal operation. No New England traders are known to have completed a sequential circuit of the full triangle, which took a calendar year on average, according to historian Clifford Shipton.[11] The concept of the New England Triangular trade was first suggested, inconclusively, in an 1866 book by George H. Moore, was picked up in 1872 by historian George C. Mason, and reached full consideration from a lecture in 1887 by American businessman and historian William B. Weeden.[11]
In the context of an incohesive operation rather than a sequential circuit, expansive eastern seaboard "Farms" had, in earnest after 1690, sustained southern New England proprietorship, land banks, and currency within a Greater Caribbean plantation complex. Historian Sean Kelley examines nineteenth-century "American slavers" because "the North American transatlantic slave trade before 1776 was, in essence, merely another branch of the carrying trade."[23][24] During the seventeenth century, colonial charters and royal commissioners precluded earlier attempts to establish a New England carrying trade by, for example, the Atherton Trading Company and John Hull. But proposals by Peleg Sanford provided implementation frameworks for "Farms" and carriers. Linkages within the complex would also ebb and flow with the tides of war and hurricanes. Before 1780, the Atlantic hurricane season contributed to New England and Greater Caribbean circumvention of mercantile trade restrictions. Newport carriers, for instance, provisioned Dutch, Danish, and especially French plantations in the Greater Caribbean, periodically more than lackluster British sites, to recompense for hurricane reductions in exports and imports.[25] Periodic trials and executions of notorious smugglers diminshed royal peacetime embargoes, particularly in response to illegal carrying as well as General Assembly endorsement of Aquidneck as a haven for pirates. These pirates began to disperse from Newport between Queen Anne's War and 1723 mass executions, establishing the seaport as the dominant carrying hub, with Providence coming in a distant second. British carriers continued to provision plantations outside the boundaries of empire.[26][27]
Wartime embargoes that reduced overseas trade would, in turn, spur speculative ventures as well as land and estuary auctions of
Newport and Bristol, Rhode Island, were major ports involved in the colonial triangular slave trade.[37] Many significant Newport merchants and traders participated in the trade, working closely with merchants and traders in the Caribbean and Charleston, South Carolina.[38]
Statistics
According to research provided by Emory University[39] as well as Henry Louis Gates Jr., an estimated 12.5 million slaves were transported from Africa to colonies in North and South America. The website Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database assembles data regarding past trafficking in slaves from Africa. It shows that the top four nations were Portugal, Great Britain, France, and Spain.
Flag of vessels carrying the slaves | ||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Destination | Portuguese | British | French | Spanish | Dutch | American | Danish | Total |
Portuguese Brazil | 4,821,127 | 3,804 | 9,402 | 1,033 | 27,702 | 1,174 | 130 | 4,864,372 |
British Caribbean | 7,919 | 2,208,296 | 22,920 | 5,795 | 6,996 | 64,836 | 1,489 | 2,318,251 |
French Caribbean | 2,562 | 90,984 | 1,003,905 | 725 | 12,736 | 6,242 | 3,062 | 1,120,216 |
Spanish Americas | 195,482 | 103,009 | 92,944 | 808,851 | 24,197 | 54,901 | 13,527 | 1,292,911 |
Dutch Americas | 500 | 32,446 | 5,189 | 0 | 392,022 | 9,574 | 4,998 | 444,729 |
United States | 382 | 264,910 | 8,877 | 1,851 | 1,212 | 110,532 | 983 | 388,747 |
Danish West Indies | 0 | 25,594 | 7,782 | 277 | 5,161 | 2,799 | 67,385 | 108,998 |
Europe | 2,636 | 3,438 | 664 | 0 | 2,004 | 119 | 0 | 8,861 |
Africa | 69,206 | 841 | 13,282 | 66,391 | 3,210 | 2,476 | 162 | 155,568 |
did not arrive | 748,452 | 526,121 | 216,439 | 176,601 | 79,096 | 52,673 | 19,304 | 1,818,686 |
Total | 5,848,266 | 3,259,443 | 1,381,404 | 1,061,524 | 554,336 | 305,326 | 111,040 | 12,521,339 |
Other triangular trades
The term "triangular trade" also refers to a variety of other trades.
- A triangular trade is hypothesized to have taken place among ancient East Greece (and possibly Attica), Kommos, and Egypt.[40]
- A trade pattern which evolved before the salt cod), agricultural produce or lumber, from British North American colonies to slaves and planters in the West Indies; sugar and molasses from the Caribbean; and various manufactured commodities from Great Britain.[41]
- The shipment of Newfoundland salt cod and corn from Boston in British vessels to southern Europe.[42] This also included the shipment of wine and olive oil to Britain.
- A new "sugar triangle" developed in the 1820s and 1830s whereby American ships took local produce to Cuba, then brought sugar or coffee from Cuba to the Baltic coast (Russian Empire and Sweden), then bar iron and hemp back to New England.[43]
See also
Notes
- OCLC 32840704.
- S2CID 153930643.
- ISBN 978-0-7614-2143-6.
- ^ Weber, Jacques. "La traite négrière nantaise de 1763 à 1793" (PDF). Centre national de la recherche scientifique (in French).
- ^ Vindt, Gérard; Consil, Jean-Michel (June 2013). "Nantes, Bordeaux et l'économie esclavagiste – Au XVIIIe siècle, les villes de Nantes et de Bordeaux profitent toutes deux de la "traite négrière" et de l'économie esclavagiste". Alternatives économiques. 325: 17–21.
- ISBN 9780191566271. Retrieved 16 October 2020.
- ISBN 9780231137140.
- ^ Liverpool and the Slave Trade, by Anthony Tibbles, Director of the Merseyside Maritime Museum
- ^ About.com: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Archived 2008-10-14 at the Wayback Machine. Accessed 6 November 2007.
- ^ "Triangular Trade". National Maritime Museum. Archived from the original on 25 November 2011.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-307-33862-4.
- ^ Scotland and the Abolition of the Slave Trade Archived 2012-01-03 at the Wayback Machine. Accessed 28 March 2007.
- ISSN 0013-8266.
- S2CID 204268220.
- ^ A. P. Middleton, Tobacco Coast.
- S2CID 59449310.
- ^ Wolfe, Brendan (1 February 2021). "Slave Ships and the Middle Passage". In Miller, Patti (ed.). Encyclopedia Virginia. Charlottesville, VA: Virginia Humanities – Library of Virginia. Retrieved 4 March 2021.
- ^ Emmer, P.C.: The Dutch in the Atlantic Economy, 1580–1880. Trade, Slavery and Emancipation. Variorum Collected Studies Series CS614, 1998.
- ISBN 0-521-46020-4.
- ^ Klein, Herbert S. The Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge University Press 1999. p. 101.
- .
- ^ "Slavery in Rhode Island". Slavery in the North. Accessed 11 September 2011.
- ISBN 978-0-300-27155-3.
- ISSN 0028-7504.
- ISBN 978-0-691-17360-3.
- ISSN 0022-4529.
- ISBN 978-1-4696-1795-4.
- ISSN 0043-5597.
- ^ Kulik, Gary (1985). "Dams, Fishes, and Farmers: Defense of Public Rights in Eighteenth-Century Rhode Island". The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America. University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill): 25–50.
- ISBN 978-0-8078-6078-6.
- JSTOR 2938039.
- ISBN 978-1-4214-3932-7.
- ISBN 978-1-4798-7042-4.
- ISBN 978-1-4696-1535-6.
- ISBN 978-1-4798-7042-4.
- ISBN 978-1-4000-4265-4.
- ^ "The Unrighteous Traffick". The Providence Journal. March 12, 2006. Archived from the original on September 12, 2009. Retrieved July 31, 2010.
- JSTOR 365360.
- ^ Slave Voyages, Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade - Estimates
- ISBN 9780924171802.
- ISBN 0-8027-1326-2.
- ISBN 0-521-33017-3. pp. 64–77.
- ISBN 978-90-04-16153-5, 273.
External links
- The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, a portal to data concerning the history of the triangular trade of transatlantic slave trade voyages.
- Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice