This meant there was a good profit to be made, which made the risks worthwhile. Some ships then loaded up with sugar and rum to sell in Britain, before making the voyage back home. The triangular trade Map showing the Triangular Trade during the slave trade and the places involved The 'Triangular Trade' was the sailing route taken by British slave traders.
Enslaved people were chained together to be moved. National 5 Subjects National 5 Subjects up. 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.
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.
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.
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. 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. 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.
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