The Triangular Trade
Discover the triangular trade — the three-legged Atlantic commerce connecting European goods, enslaved Africans, and American plantation products in a system of exploitation.
The triangular trade was the three-part Atlantic commercial system that connected Europe, Africa, and the Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries. It was the economic infrastructure of the Atlantic slave trade and one of the defining features of early modern globalization.
The first leg carried European manufactured goods — textiles, firearms, metalware, alcohol — to West Africa, where they were exchanged for enslaved people. The second leg — the infamous Middle Passage — transported enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and the Americas under conditions of extreme brutality. The third leg carried American plantation products — sugar, tobacco, cotton, rum, coffee — to European markets, where they generated enormous profits and fueled consumer revolutions.
The triangular trade was not a single, fixed route but a complex web of overlapping commercial circuits. Not all ships followed the full triangle — many conducted bilateral trade. But the system as a whole created an Atlantic economy in which European industry, African labor, and American land were bound together in a cycle of exploitation that enriched European merchants, devastated African societies, and built the plantation economies of the Americas on the suffering of millions of enslaved people.