Atlantic trade between Europe, Africa, and the Americas from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.
The triangle trade began in the fifteenth century as Europeans explored the coast of West Africa and established a series of trading posts. Initially, the trade involved the exchange of European goods such as swords and other metalwares, cloth, and Asian products such as silks, much of which Africans bought as symbols of prestige and status. Europeans exchanged these for African gold and tropical products such as kola nuts. As the trade grew, it displaced the trans-Saharan trade with North Africa as sub-Saharan African products shifted toward the coastal export trade with Europeans.
The trade changed in the sixteenth century primarily because of the colonization of the Americas. American colonization and the rise of the plantation system led to increasing demands for labor from colonists growing cash crops for European markets. With the colonization of the New World and the need for labor, the trade in African slaves, which Europeans engaged in from the 1440s onward, took on a new significance, creating a trading pattern consisting of three stages that came to be called the triangle trade. The first stage between Europe and Africa developed into the trading of European goods for African slaves. Once coastal supplies of slaves decreased, interior raiding occurred, destabilizing many African kingdoms.
The second stage in the triangle trade consisted of transporting Africans to the Americas, where slave traders exchanged slaves for cash or raw materials, cash crops like sugar or tobacco, timber products, and iron. Ship captains purchased more goods to take back to Europe with the profit from slave sales. This constituted the third leg of the Atlantic triangle. The process then repeated itself.
It is important to note that each stage had its own cargo, and European merchants who financed such voyages realized a profit at each stage. The profit allowed merchants in Europe and to an extent the Americas to finance the Industrial Revolution and the capitalist factory system. As time passed and the colonies in the Americas developed, a direct trade between Europe and the Americas emerged as well.
Some historians argue that the triangle trade is a myth and that it did not encourage the devel opment of Western capitalism. Such assessments overlook the fact that early industries including shipbuilding, iron for chains and shackles, and weapons manufacturers grew rapidly because of the trade in Africa for slaves. While not every expedition followed this triangle route, this trade began with legitimate traffic and evolved into the transatlantic slave trade, which many profited from well into the nineteenth century.
A shift occurred in the nineteenth century, however, as pressure to end the slave trade increased and a number of nations outlawed trafficking in humans. During this process, legitimate trade reemerged, as Europeans and North American traders became interested in tropical products such as palm oil, which factory owners used to lubricate machines in their factories. By this time, the triangle trade declined, giving way to direct trade between the United States, Europe, and Africa.
Eugene S. Vansickle
See also: Atlantic Trade; Slavery; Saharan and Trans-Saharan Trade.
Klein, Herbert. The Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Shillington, Kevin. History of Africa. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.