Which made up the triangular trade

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. Some were domestics and worked as butlers, waiters, maids, seamstresses, and launderers.

Others were assigned as carriage drivers, hostlers, and stable boys. Artisans—carpenters, stonemasons, blacksmiths, millers, coopers, spinners, and weavers—were also employed as part of plantation labor forces. Enslaved Africans also worked in urban areas. Upward of ten percent of the enslaved African population in the United States lived in cities.

In the southern cities they totaled approximately a third of the population. The range of slave occupations in cities was vast. Domestic servants dominated, but there were carpenters, fishermen, coopers, draymen, sailors, masons, bricklayers, blacksmiths, bakers, tailors, peddlers, painters, and porters. Although most worked directly for their owners, others were hired out to work as skilled laborers on plantations, on public works projects, and in industrial enterprises. A small percentage hired themselves out and paid their owners a percentage of their earnings.

Each plantation economy was part of a larger national and international political economy. The cotton plantation economy, for instance, is generally seen as part of the regional economy of the American South. By the s, "cotton was king" indeed in the South. It was also king in the United States, which was competing for economic leadership in the global political economy. Plantation-grown cotton was the foundation of the antebellum southern economy. But the American financial and shipping industries were also dependent on slave-produced cotton.

So was the British textile industry. Cotton was not shipped directly to Europe from the South. Rather, it was shipped to New York and then transshipped to England and other centers of cotton manufacturing in the United States and Europe. Recruited as an inexpensive source of labor, enslaved Africans in the United States also became important economic and political capital in the American political economy.

Enslaved Africans were legally a form of property—a commodity. Individually and collectively, they were frequently used as collateral in all kinds of business transactions. They were also traded for other kinds of goods and services. The value of the investments slaveholders held in their slaves was often used to secure loans to purchase additional land or slaves. Slaves were also used to pay off outstanding debts. When calculating the value of estates, the estimated value of each slave was included.

This became the source of tax revenue for local and state governments. Taxes were also levied on slave transactions. Politically, the U. Constitution incorporated a feature that made enslaved Africans political capital—to the benefit of southern states.

The so-called three-fifths compromise allowed the southern states to count their slaves as three-fifths of a person for purposes of calculating states' representation in the U. Thus the balance of power between slaveholding and non-slaveholding states turned, in part, on the three-fifths presence of enslaved Africans in the census. Slaveholders were taxed on the same three-fifths principle, and no taxes paid on slaves supported the national treasury.

In sum, the slavery system in the United States was a national system that touched the very core of its economic and political life. All rights reserved. Rice and indigo plantations in South Carolina also employed enslaved African labor.

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. 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. 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? 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.