Title: What was the Triangular Trade? [Video]
Headings: What was the Triangular Trade?
What was the Triangular Trade?
Triangular Trades

Content: Some shrewd Spanish officials quickly modified Spanish policy on the participation of English merchants. During Hawkins’s second voyage in 1564, officials in Borburata in western Venezuela took the lead by granting Hawkins a commercial license to sell African slaves in the colony, in return for Hawkins paying a tax. In effect, this gave Spain a monopoly on the trade of African slaves in their colonies, with heavy private contracting. This was the asiento, a monopoly of the Spanish crown on the transatlantic slave trade between Africa and Spanish colonies in the Americas, that was in place from the early 1500s. It required any outside person, company, or government wishing to take part in this trade to contract with the Spanish government, which involved paying for a slave-trading license under a bidding process, and then subsequently paying a tax to Madrid and fulfilling an order for a specific amount of slaves. As a result, slavery in the Triangular Trade became big business. The merchants participating in it could thereby tap into the enormous gold and silver reserves of the Spanish Empire, which were often used as the currency for buying slaves – and which were originally extracted by slaves from large-scale mines in the Americas. Slaves were also sold to plantation owners in the Portuguese, English, French, and Dutch colonies in the Americas – by the 18th century in enormous numbers. When fully operational, the Triangular Trade involved English merchants trading goods including copper and fur on the African continent in return for African slaves, who were then transported across the Atlantic in the so-called “Middle Passage” to be sold for gold and silver, which the merchants then used to buy various slave-extracted raw materials from plantation owners, including molasses, tobacco, and cotton. These raw materials were then shipped to Europe, sold for a profit, and processed into manufactured goods in European cities, including rum and textiles, which would then be exchanged on the African continent by European merchants with African merchants for captured African slaves, beginning the triangle over again.