triangular trade essay

Triangular Trade in Colonial America

The Triangular Trade was a Transatlantic network of trade routes that were used during the Colonial Era, to ship goods between England, Africa, and the Americas.

This illustration depicts a Sugar Plantation in the West Indies. Image Source: Library of Congress .

Triangular Trade Summary

Triangular Trade in Colonial America involved shipping commodities between three ports in a triangular sequence. The starting port was in West Africa, where manufactured goods were traded for captive Africans. The second port was the West Indies or the 13 Original Colonies , where Africans were traded for natural resources like rum, sugar, molasses, and cotton. The third port was England where raw materials were traded for manufactured goods. The first Triangular Trade journey was carried out by Sir John Hawkins in 1562 and the routes were shaped by geography and British economic policies.

Triangular Trade Facts 

The Triangular Trade was a Transatlantic network of trade routes that were used during the Colonial Era, to ship goods between England, Africa, and the Americas. There were three main routes:

• England to Africa.
• Africa to the 13 Original Colonies and the British West Indies.
• The Americas back to England.

Goods were often traded, rather than purchased with specie — gold and silver.  The goods that were traded typically included:

• Raw materials — rum, timber, sugar, tobacco, rice, and cotton — from the 13 Original Colonies and the British West Indies.
• Manufactured goods from England and Europe, such as guns, cloth, furniture, and jewelry.
• Captive people from West Africa, who were sold into slavery in South America, the West Indies, and the American Colonies.

Causes of the Triangular Trade Routes

Triangular Trade Routes were caused by three main factors:

• The Mercantile System
• The Navigation Acts

The trade routes were shaped by geography as much as anything because there was no easy route from the Americas or Europe to the Far East. Rrumors persisted of a legendary “Northwest Passage” to the Far East, which spurred many of the early expeditions during the Age of Exploration.

Triangular Trade routes were also shaped by England’s Mercantile System and the Navigation Acts, which placed significant restrictions on trade within the British Empire. Over time, more restrictions were added and a complex system emerged that was difficult to follow and to enforce. 

The Mercantile System was an economic system that required England to maintain a positive trade balance, so it retained as much gold and silver as possible. In the system, colonies played an important role, because they provided raw materials. Because England controlled the colonies, it did not have to trade gold and silver for the raw materials. Further, the finished products had more value than the raw materials, which allowed England to maintain a favorable trade balance with its colonies.

The Navigation Acts required exports from the colonies to be transported on English ships, which had to pass through English ports, regardless of their final destination. When ships arrived in port, customs officials were required to check the shipments and collect customs duties.

Salutary Neglect

By the 1720s, Britain was caught up in European affairs and Prime Minister Robert Walpole encouraged a policy in which British customs officials neglected to enforce the Navigation Acts and collect customs duties. 

The unwritten policy, which became known as “Salutary Neglect,” allowed American merchants to expand their markets and increase their profits. Despite this, the triangle-shaped routes continued to be used, primarily because the American Colonies and West Indies Colonies depended on slave labor from West Africa and manufactured products from England. 

Although customs officials often looked the other way, they were also paid to do so through bribes. This led to an increase in bribery and smuggling, especially in the New England Colonies, where molasses from the West Indies was vital to the rum distilling industry.

Following the French and Indian War, Prime Minister George Grenville issued instructions for customs officials to enforce the Molasses Act , bringing Salutary Neglect to an end .

Transatlantic Slave Trade

Triangular Trade was closely associated with the Transatlantic Slave Trade . The capture of Africans for sale in slave markets was established by a network of African kingdoms, the Spanish , and the Portuguese. Over time, the Dutch and English became involved in the business.

The First Triangular Trade Voyage

The first expedition specifically to transport captive Africans to sell in the New World is believed to have been carried out by Sir John Hawkins, an English sea captain, in 1562. Hawkins captured and traded for captive Africans along the coast of Africa, and sailed to the Caribbean, where he traded them for pearls, animal hides, and sugar. The expedition was so lucrative that a coat of arms was designed for him, which included a crude drawing of an enslaved African. The first trip is considered by some to be the first implement and profit from the Triangular Trade Route.

The Cycle of Triangular Trade

Overall, the shipment of goods along the Triangular Trade routes moved in a fairly consistent manner:

• From England, Ships sailed to Africa, carrying manufactured goods and products, which were traded for captive Africans, gold, and spices.
• Leaving Africa, ships sailed to the West Indies and the American Colonies over the “Middle Passage.” Upon arrival, they traded slaves for raw materials.
• From the Americas, Ships transported raw materials back to England, where they were used to manufacture finished goods and products.

Chart of Exports Traded by the 13 Original Colonies

England established the colonies as a way to produce raw materials for British manufacturing companies, which was a key aspect of the Mercantile System. Another important part of the system was the restriction of manufacturing in the 13 Original Colonies. There were various acts passed that restricted manufacturing, ensuring British manufacturers received all the raw materials and natural resources. One important exception to the rules was shipbuilding, which was allowed.

New England Colonies Exports

• New Hampshire — Ships, Timber, Rum
• Massachusetts — Ships, Timber, Rum, Fish, Whale Products, Fur, Wool
• Rhode Island — Ships, Rum, Timber, Corn
• Connecticut — Ships, Timber, Flour, Fish, Rum

Middle Colonies Exports

• New York — Fur Trade, Flour, Timber, Iron Ore
• New Jersey — Agricultural Products, Iron Ore
• Pennsylvania — Grains and other Agricultural Products, Iron Ore
• Delaware — Fur, Timber, Iron Ore

Chesapeake Colonies Exports

• Maryland — Fish, Timber, Fur, Tobacco, Sugar
• Virginia   — Corn, Flax, Tobacco, Sugar

Southern Colonies Exports

• North Carolina — Rice, Indigo, Tobacco, Sugar
• South Carolina — Indigo, Rice, Tobacco, Sugar
• Georgia — Tobacco, Cotton, Sugar

Triangular Trade Significance

Triangular Trade is significant to United States history because of the role it played in creating an economic system in the American Colonies.

Triangular Trade APUSH Review

Use the following links and videos to study Triangular Trade, the Mercantile System, and the Colonial Era for the AP US History Exam. Also, be sure to look at our Guide to the AP US History Exam .

Triangular Trade APUSH Definition and Significance

The definition of Triangular Trade for APUSH is a complex system of trade routes that developed during the Colonia Era. It involved three main legs: the first leg saw English goods, including firearms and textiles, shipped to Africa in exchange for enslaved Africans. The second leg consisted of the Middle Passage, where enslaved Africans were transported to the Americas. The third leg involved the transport of raw materials back to England. Triangular Trade played a significant role in shaping the economies of the 13 Original Colonies.

Triangular Trade Video for APUSH Notes

This video from Heimler’s History discusses the Triangular Trade system.

• Written by Randal Rust

The Triangular Trade

In the year 1730, in the region of present-day Senegal, a man named Ayuba Suleiman Diallo traveled down to an English port on the coast to purchase paper, likely manufactured in Europe, an important item for his Muslim cleric father. To purchase the paper, his father had given him a pair of slaves to trade, but on the way home, however, Ayuba encountered a roving band of Mandinka raiders who took him prisoner and sold him into slavery to an English captain in turn, making him one of the many millions who fell victim to the Atlantic Slave Trade. Ayuba’s account, written down years later as Some Memoirs of the Life of Job, the Son of Solomon…Who was a Slave About Two Years in Maryland…, does not describe the likely atrocious journey across the ocean to North America, where, on average, between 12% and 15% of slaves crossing the Atlantic died while in transit. The memoir is useful nonetheless for its brief glimpse into how the slave trade actually operated on the African continent. Far from existing in isolation, the Atlantic Slave Trade was interwoven into a vast, intercontinental mercantile system commonly called the Triangular Trade. 

When Europeans began sailing further out onto the open ocean in the early-to-mid 15th century, they discovered that navigating the ocean required utilizing a series of perpetual wind cycles and ocean currents, such as the North Atlantic Gyre and the Gulf Stream. Portuguese navigators in particular established a kind of triangular route while exploring the western coast of Africa with the aid of the Northeast trade winds that dominate the tropics, returning to Europe not by reversing course, but sailing northwest to the Azores and catching the Southwest Westerlies home. Christopher Columbus himself became the first person to apply this principle to a transatlantic voyage, sailing north after making landfall in the Caribbean before returning to tell the world his discoveries. It is possible that Columbus also brought enslaved Africans with him on his first voyage, making him the first “triangle trader,” and as the various European powers began establishing their colonies in North and South America, introducing cash crops like sugarcane and adopting others like tobacco. In the meantime, the process of triangular maritime routes became the standard practice of transatlantic navigation. 

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. Often these goods were luxuries items made to be consumed by Europe’s elite classes, like chocolate which did not exist in a solid form yet, but as the continent inched towards the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, lower class people began consuming sugar and coffee as useful stimulants: “fuel for the labor,” as one historian put it. 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? Surely wealthy individuals in Williamsburg, Vera Cruz, or Saint-Domingue enjoyed chocolate and coffee just as much as in London, Madrid or Paris. What prevented an English merchant from buying sugar in Dutch-ruled Aruba and selling it in Portuguese Brazil? The reason is that any of those practices ran up against the economic theory of Mercantilism, which in its simplest terms advocated the accumulation and circulation of precious metals (or bullion) within a single country’s market but taken to its logical extreme believed that countries should maximize exports and minimize imports under the assumption of international trade as a zero-sum game. 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.  

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 1660, 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. France committed itself and its colonies to similar principles, called Exclusif (exclusive) by King Louis XIV’s Minister of Finance Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who also forbade the colonies from developing any kind of local manufacturing to protect industries in the metropole. Colbert’s policies of protecting domestic manufacturing later had a major influence on Alexander Hamilton. 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. As mentioned before, the usual items traded for slaves were finished products, to avoid spending as much gold or silver as possible. These could include the same luxury items consumed by European elites, but also products like rum, paper and cotton cloth worked just as well, as demonstrated by Ayuba’s testimony. 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. 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. 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. Around 39% of slaves brought to Spanish America were brought over by non-Spanish ships, British and Portuguese in particular. The vast majority of these voyages disembarked at Caribbean, Central or South American ports. If one gets the sense that North America was something of an afterthought in the entire process, they would be correct, as only 3% of slaves from Africa were sold in North America for a number of reasons. The first is that while cotton and tobacco were profitable, crops like sugarcane can only be grown in tropical climates, which North American colonies lacked. The other reason is that slaves in North America did not die as often. As an economic practice, human misery drove slavery and saying that does more than make a moral point. Sugarcane farming in the Caribbean and South America was extraordinarily deadly for slaves, and plantation owners considered importing new slaves a cheaper option than properly maintaining their current workforce, creating a constant demand for new workers and perpetuating the cycle of the triangular trade.  

As the 18th century progressed, Mercantilism eventually fell into disuse, especially with the 1776 publication of The Wealth of Nations by Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, the first major work of modern capitalist theory. Smith argued against the high tariffs, government intervention in industries, and other barriers to free trade that defined earlier economic thought, and the rapidly industrializing Europe soon came around to his way of thinking. The slave trade also went into decline in the 19th century, as abolitionism took hold in Britain and France, though obviously, slavery continued in the United States and Brazil. Combined with the collapse of Spain’s Latin American empire, these factors all contributed to the Triangular Trade system falling into irrelevancy. It did not, however, cause the end of colonization, which began again in Asia and Africa itself in the coming decades.  

Further Reading: 

• The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation By: Daina Ramey Berry 
• Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade By: David Eltis and David Richardson
• The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade   By: Christopher L. Miller 
• www.slavevoyages.com  sponsored by Emory University 

"Negro, Mulatto, or Indian man slave[s]": African Americans in the Rhode Island Regiments, 1775-1783

Boone Hall Plantation & Gardens

African Americans at Antietam

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The Historical Intricacies of Triangular Trade

This essay about the historical intricacies of triangular trade explores the complex web of commerce during the era of European colonialism. It highlights the interconnected trade routes between Europe, Africa, and the Americas, focusing on the exchange of goods, labor, and culture. The essay delves into the origins, key components, and lasting impact of triangular trade, particularly emphasizing its role in facilitating the transatlantic slave trade and economic exploitation. Despite fueling European prosperity and technological advancement, triangular trade inflicted profound harm on Africa and the Americas, leaving enduring legacies of inequality and injustice. You can also find more related free essay samples at PapersOwl about Trade.

How it works

Triangular trade, an intricate web of commerce woven during the era of European colonialism, stands as a pivotal chapter in global economic history. This system, characterized by its triangular routes linking Europe, Africa, and the Americas, played a profound role in shaping the modern world economy. To grasp its complexities, one must delve into its origins, core elements, and lasting repercussions.

At its heart, triangular trade revolved around three key regions: Europe, Africa, and the Americas, forming interconnected trade routes. European powers, notably Portugal, Spain, England, France, and the Netherlands, orchestrated this network to procure sought-after commodities such as sugar, tobacco, cotton, and spices from the Americas.

These goods were then exchanged for African slaves, who were subsequently transported to the Americas to toil on plantations, mines, and other ventures, generating raw materials destined for Europe’s burgeoning industries.

The Atlantic slave trade, a grim facet of triangular trade, cast a long shadow over human history. Millions of Africans endured harrowing voyages across the Atlantic under brutal conditions, coerced into servitude to meet the labor demands of European colonies. This transatlantic trafficking left indelible marks on societies, fueling debates on race, equality, and justice that persist to this day.

Triangular trade was marked by economic exploitation, with European powers profiting from the resources and labor of indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans. This system perpetuated inequality, fostering the concentration of wealth and power in Europe while sowing seeds of discord and suffering elsewhere. Yet, it also facilitated the exchange of goods, crops, and ideas across continents, catalyzing agricultural innovation, culinary fusion, and technological progress.

Despite its role in fueling European prosperity, triangular trade inflicted profound harm on Africa and the Americas. African societies were ravaged by the slave trade, enduring demographic upheaval, social disintegration, and economic disruption. Meanwhile, indigenous populations in the Americas faced decimation, displacement, and subjugation, leaving enduring scars on the landscape and psyche of these regions.

In essence, triangular trade stands as a testament to the intricate interplay of power, profit, and exploitation in human history. Its legacy underscores the enduring impact of colonialism, slavery, and globalization on contemporary societies. By unraveling the threads of triangular trade, we gain insights into the forces that have shaped our world and the ongoing quest for justice, equity, and reconciliation.

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3 The Triangular Trade

• Published: December 2007
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The ships involved in the slave trade followed a triangular route between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Generations of historians have there- fore referred to transatlantic slaving by its geometrical shape, as a triangular trade. The first leg of the triangle was the outward voyage from the English home port—usually London, Bristol, or Liverpool—to the West African coast. Ships sailed laden with manufactured goods that could be exchanged for slaves in Africa.

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