Triangular Trade

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  The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1815

  • Johannes Postma(Author)
  • 1990(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  The Triangular Trade The Dutch slave trade, like that of other European nations, can truly be called a Triangular Trade because it involved three principal stages or legs and three different continental regions. European goods were shipped from there to Africa, where they were exchanged for slaves, who in turn were taken across the ocean to some destination in the Americas. There the slaves were exchanged for either cash, promissory notes, or tropical agricultural produce that was then shipped back to Europe. Although there were several variations of this pattern, which has made some historians question the triangularity of the system, broadly speaking this was at least the general pattern of the Atlantic slave trade as practiced by Europeans. English writers called this system the "great circuit trade." Slave ships originating from Brazil followed a bilateral pattern and, in a sense, the same can be said about slavers from North America, although the latter have also had their slave- trade pattern referred to as triangular. This chapter focuses on the various stages of the Dutch triangular slave trade, clarifying the basic pattern as well as pointing to the exceptions and peculiarities within the system, and it places the major emphasis on the so-called middle passage in which the slaves were the crucial elements. 1 Preparation and voyage to Africa Once it became apparent that a profitable slaving mission could be under- taken, the interested authorities assigned a ship for that task. In the case of the WIC, the Heren X authorized specific missions for a specific chamber, specifying the year and the African and American destinations. The des- ignated WIC chamber then selected a ship, appointed the master or captain, i. See Walter E. Minchington, "The Triangular Trade Revisited," in The Uncommon Market (New York: Academic Press, 1979), pp. 331-52, for an examination of the debate on the Triangular Trade; Davison, pp. 51 and 62. 149

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  Capitalism and Slavery

  • Eric Williams(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • The University of North Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  BRITISH COMMERCE AND THE Triangular Trade

  A. THE Triangular Trade

  According to Adam Smith, the discovery of America and the Cape route to India are “the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind.” The importance of the discovery of America lay not in the precious metals it provided but in the new and inexhaustible market it afforded for European commodities. One of its principal effects was to “raise the mercantile system to a degree of splendour and glory which it could never otherwise have attained to.”1 It gave rise to an enormous increase in world trade. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the centuries of trade, as the nineteenth century was the century of production. For Britain that trade was primarily the Triangular Trade. In 1718 William Wood said that the slave trade was “the spring and parent whence the others flow.”2 A few years later Postlethwayt described the slave trade as “the first principle and foundation of all the rest, the mainspring of the machine which sets every wheel in motion.”3

  In this Triangular Trade England—France and Colonial America equally—supplied the exports and the ships; Africa the human merchandise; the plantations the colonial raw materials. The slave ship sailed from the home country with a cargo of manufactured goods. These were exchanged at a profit on the coast of Africa for Negroes, who were traded on the plantations, at another profit, in exchange for a cargo of colonial produce to be taken back to the home country. As the volume of trade increased, the Triangular Trade was supplemented, but never supplanted, by a direct trade between home country and the West Indies, exchanging home manufactures directly for colonial produce.

  The Triangular Trade thereby gave a triple stimulus to British industry. The Negroes were purchased with British manufactures; transported to the plantations, they produced sugar, cotton, indigo, molasses and other tropical products, the processing of which created new industries in England; while the maintenance of the Negroes and their owners on the plantations provided another market for British industry, New England agriculture and the Newfoundland fisheries. By 1750 there was hardly a trading or a manufacturing town in England which was not in some way connected with the triangular or direct colonial trade.4

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  Events That Formed the Modern World

  From the European Renaissance through the War on Terror [5 volumes]

  • Frank W. Thackeray, John E. Findling, Frank W. Thackeray, John E. Findling(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  The slave trade was an integral part of what became known as the “Triangular Trade,” a complex and sophisticated exchange of goods that involved Europe, Africa, and the New World. While there were many variations on a single theme, the most common form of Triangular Trade featured ships laden with European goods such as cloth, spirits, iron, brass, guns, and gunpowder landing at African ports. These European products would be exchanged for slaves. The slaves would then be transported to the New World, usually Brazil, the Caribbean islands, Latin America, or what would become the southern United States. There the human cargo would be exchanged for plantation products, usually sugar or sugar products such as molasses, that would be sent back to Europe for sale.

  The leg of the Triangular Trade that brought slaves from Africa to the New World was called the middle passage, and it was brutal in the extreme. To maximize profits, slavers crammed as many bodies as they could into the holds of their boats. Africans were manacled and arranged head to toe with barely enough overhead room to sit upright in their place. They wallowed in their own filth among rats and vermin except when permitted on deck, where the crew exercised them under harsh conditions. Disease was rampant, and to save money, the slavers cut rations to the bone. The average middle passage lasted from 4 to 10 weeks. Although many Africans died en route, the significant profits that the slavers made provided economic justification for the ill treatment of the slaves.

  Not surprisingly, verifiable figures about the slave trade are difficult to find. Nevertheless, most experts conclude that approximately 10 to 11 million Africans were brought to the New World. Of that number, about 40 percent ended up in Brazil and another 40 percent in the Caribbean. The remaining 20 percent ended up in British North America and Spanish America. Frequently the slave population dwarfed the European one. For example, at the time of the French Revolution, the population of Saint Domingue (Haiti) consisted of 500,000 slaves and only 35,000 whites.

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  The Earth and Its Peoples

  A Global History

  • Richard Bulliet, Pamela Crossley, Daniel Headrick, Steven Hirsch(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Ships making the long voyage from Europe to the Indian Ocean and Asia typically exchanged African gold and American silver for cotton textiles and spices. Merchants then sold these Asian goods in Africa and the Americas as well as in Europe. Many commercial routes were more direct, carrying manufactured goods from Europe or foodstuffs and lumber from New England to the Caribbean. Some Rhode Island and Massachusetts merchants participated in a “Triangular Trade” that carried rum to West Africa, slaves to the West Indies, and molasses and rum back to New England. There was also a considerable two-way trade between Brazil and Angola that exchanged Brazilian tobacco and liquor for slaves. Brazilian tobacco also found its way north as a staple of the Canadian fur trade. European investment capital, manufactured goods, and shipping dominated the Atlantic system. Europe was also the principal market for American plantation products, products that helped transform European material culture. Before the seventeenth century, sugar was scarce and expensive in Europe and was mostly consumed by the rich. As colonial production increased, prices fell and consumption of sugar in England rose to about 4 pounds (nearly 2 kilograms) per person in 1700. Europeans of modest means spooned sugar into popular new beverages imported from overseas—tea, coffee, and chocolate—to overcome the beverages’ natural bitterness. Con-sumption increased to about 18 pounds (8 kilograms) by the early nineteenth century (well below the American average of about 152 pounds [69 kilograms] a year today). The flow of sugar to Europe depended on the flow of slaves from Africa (see Map 19.2). The rising volume of the Middle Passage is one measure of the expansion of the Atlantic sys-tem. During the 150 years following the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, the slave trade brought some 800,000 Africans across the Atlantic.

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  The French Atlantic Triangle

  Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade

  • Christopher L. Miller(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Duke University Press Books

    (Publisher)

  But both did exist, and as a consequence nearly all the captives sold across the Atlantic were delivered to European traders by African traders for prices that were mutually agreeable.24 The trans-Saharan and “Oriental” trades in slaves for the Arab world preceded the Atlantic trade by centuries and is estimated to have deported “anywhere from 3.5 to 10 million Africans” be-fore the Portuguese even began and as many as 17 million from the sev-enth century through the twentieth.25 The first Europeans to trade in Africa enmeshed themselves in the practices of existing Muslim systems.26 Over the centuries the expansion and increased brutality of slavery within sub-Saharan Africa was a response both to the Atlantic and trans-Sahara slave 47  A ro u n D T h e T r i An g l e  trades and to the abolition of the former. Both slave trades caused a huge expansion in the institution of slavery in Africa.27 Africa was, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in effect, a com-mercial center in which Europe and the Middle East were intensely inter-ested, the crossroads of several different exploitative schemes—all be-cause of slavery and the desire of the outside world to make Africans work for them. Africa was desired by France (and other European powers) but only in response to a lack or need—for slave labor in the New World. This would seem to epitomize that negative type of desire described by Deleuze and Guattari; Europe’s embrace of Africa was a kiss of death. The trian-gulation of desire also appears as a negative here: the mise en valeur by the dominant point of the triangle (France) of one subordinate point (the An-tilles) is effected through the exploitation by extraction of the third point (Africa). Yet it is safe to say that Africa was at that time much higher on the list of the world’s priorities than it is now.

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  Tropical Babylons

  Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450-1680

  • Stuart B. Schwartz(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • The University of North Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  Despite its still small volume compared to later developments, the Atlantic slave trade by the middle of the seventeenth century was one of the most complex economic enterprises known to the preindustrial world. It was the largest transoceanic migration in history up to that time; it promoted the transportation of people and goods among three different continents; it involved an annual fleet of several hundred ships; and it absorbed a very large amount of European capital. The trade was closely associated with the development of commercial export agriculture in America, and Asian trading with Europe. It involved complex and long-term credit arrangements in Europe and Africa and was carried on by a very large number of competing merchants in an unusually free market.

  Given the high entry costs to trading, and the initial lack of detailed knowledge of the various African and American markets, the earliest period of the slave trade was one in which the state played a major role. Although slaves were shipped off the African coast by private European traders from the 1440s onward, the organization of an intensive slave trade took some time to develop. Although the Portuguese were rich enough to allow private contractors to develop some part of the early trade, both they and all the Europeans who followed used heavy state control in the form of taxation, subsidization, or monopoly contracts to get the trade going and control its flow of forced workers to America. In almost every case, the state was needed to subsidize the trade in order to get it organized. The Spaniards even declared it a royal monopoly and eventually developed a complex exclusive arrangement called the asiento for selling the right to deliver slaves, a system that lasted until the end of the eighteenth century. Though the Spanish contract holders subcontracted to private or foreign monopoly company firms, the trade was still heavily controlled by the state. Even the Portuguese finally resorted to state monopoly companies in the eighteenth century to get the trade going to colonies that were underdeveloped and lacked the capital to finance the trade.25

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  A People and a Nation, Volume I: to 1877

  • Jane Kamensky, Carol Sheriff, David W. Blight, Howard Chudacoff(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Such merchants dispatched ships to the Caribbean, where they sailed from island to island, exchanging their car- goes for molasses, sugar, fruit, dyestuffs, and slaves. Once they had a full load, the ships returned to Boston, Newport, New York, or Philadelphia to sell their cargoes (which often included enslaved people). Americans began to distill molasses into rum, a crucial aspect of the only part of the trade that could accu- rately be termed triangular. Rhode Islanders took rum to Africa to trade for slaves, whom they carried to Caribbean islands to exchange for molasses, which they carried north to produce more rum. 3-3e Slaving Voyages Tying the system together was the voyage commonly called the middle passage, which brought Africans to the Ameri- cas. Slaving ships were specially outfitted for the trade, with platforms built between decks to double the surface area to hold human cargo. In its contract with the Barbados Mer- chant for a slaving voyage in 1706, for example, the Royal African Company directed the owners to provide “platforms for ye Negroes, Shackles, bolts, firewood,” and beans, as well as “a sword & fire lock, Muskett and ammunition for each of ye ships Comp[any].” Foodstores were priced “per 100 Negroes.” Brought aboard in small groups, drawn from many inland nations, speaking diverse languages, an aver- age of 300 men, women, and children comprised what slave merchants called manufactures declined in the face of European competition. Agricultural production intensified, especially in rice-growing areas, because of the need to supply hundreds of slave ships with foodstuffs for transatlantic voyages. Because prisoners of war constituted the bulk of the exported slaves, the most active traders were also the most successful in battle. Some nations initiated conflicts specifically to acquire valuable captives.

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  The Atlantic Experience

  Peoples, Places, Ideas

  • Catherine Armstrong, Laura M. Chmielewski(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  Controlling the flow of trade goods sometimes led to conflict between Native American groups. The 1640s saw an escalation in violence between the Iroquois and their traditional enemies, the Hurons, over the flow of guns and furs in and out of the interior regions. The Iroquois supplied the Dutch, the Hurons, the French. In the 1640s, the more powerful Iroquois moved against their competitors and, through violent attack after violent attack, came close to completely obliterating the Huron people. While trade improved the lives and fortunes of some, it destroyed the liveli-hoods, and sometimes the lives, of others. Mercantilism Older histories that focus on a purely ‘colonial’ understanding of the Atlantic world speak of the importance of the so-called ‘Triangular Trade’. In this construct of early modern trade systems, raw goods moved from the Americas back to Europe; Europeans converted them into finished goods, and shipped these goods to Africa; Africans and their European business partners shipped slaves to the Americas. Though variations of this network were indeed in action, they hardly tell the entire Exploiting the Atlantic: Trade and Economy | 85 story. Rather, they were but one version of the many ways trade networks operated. In general, trade was multilateral rather than triangular, involving multiple ports, continents and commodities. Concerns such as the types of vessels carrying the commodities, winds and seasons, climate, and condition of markets in other parts of the Atlantic world influenced its complex workings. In its simplest form, mercantilism posited that strong nations kept money and raw goods within their own borders. Nations were strengthened further still when competitor nations had to go through them to access the goods they needed. With such an arrangement, a nation could easily sell needed goods for a high price, or cut out its competitors altogether from goods they needed.

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  Spain, China, and Japan in Manila, 1571-1644

  Local Comparisons and Global Connections

  • Birgit Tremml-Werner(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Amsterdam University Press

    (Publisher)

  3 The Trilogy of Triangular Trade Junk Trade, Trans-Pacif ic Trade, and Provision Trade Manila greatly mattered to everyone who traded there. It was the point of commercial contact between the economies of seventeenth-century Europe and China, and once silver was flowing, not even a massacre could break the contact. Each side brought to the table what the other one wanted to buy and could af ford, and took from it what it could use. 1 The Manila System Thus reads an enthusiastic account by China historian Timothy Brook in his study on the characteristics of global trade in the seventeenth century. His overall positive evaluation echoes the views of many sixteenth-century observers. 2 What sounds like the description of a market economy ‘Mecca’, without any government intervention, indeed reflects some of Manila’s free market-like structures, as an entrepôt for an entirely new type of commerce – the trans-Pacif ic exchange that at the same time enabled and encouraged Sino-Japanese direct exchange. As the title of this chapter suggests, the focus lies on the galleon trade and Manila. In the manner of global history trade patterns are painted with a thick brush, presenting the background image for detailed case studies on connections with China or Japan in the subsequent chapters. Contemporary historical discourse on mercantile exchange in Manila has created the illusion that silver was the only driving force behind sixteenth-century commercial exchange. The fame of the Manila Galleon is indeed closely linked to enormous amounts of world silver that eventually ended up in China. Silver flows arguably even converted Ming China into the strongest economy of the time. 3 This discourse, which spread on behalf 1 Brook (2008), Vermeer’s Hat , p. 170. 2 Chinese literati Xu Guanqi (1562-1633), promoter of an open-door policy and translator of Matteo Ricci’s work was one of the sixteenth-century admirers of the dynamics of exchange in Manila.

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