Triangular trade

Triangular trade or triangle trade is trade between three ports or regions. Triangular trade usually evolves when a region has export commodities that are not required in the region from which its major imports come. Such trade has been used to offset trade imbalances between different regions. The most commonly cited example of a triangular trade is the Atlantic slave trade, but other examples existed. These include the seventeenth-century carriage of manufactured goods from England to New England and Newfoundland, then the transport of dried cod from Newfoundland and New England to the Mediterranean and the Iberian peninsula, followed by cargoes of gold, silver, olive oil, tobacco, dried fruit, and "sacks" of wine back to England. Maritime carriers referred to this Atlantic trade as the "sack trade". A 19th-century example involved general cargo shipped from Britain to Australia, Australian coal to China, then tea and silk back to Britain. The Atlantic slave trade used a system of three-way transatlantic exchanges – known historically as the triangular trade – which operated between Europe, Africa, and the Americas from the 16th to 19th centuries. This was not the most common method of transporting slaves from Africa to the New World, as out-and-back voyages from the Americas to Africa were the more common. European merchants outfitted slave ships, then shipped manufactured European goods owned by the trading companies to West Africa to get slaves, which they shipped to the Americas (in particular to Brazil and the Caribbean islands). First, in West Africa, merchants sold or bartered European manufactured goods to local slavers in exchange for slaves. Then crews transported the slaves and the remaining European manufactured goods to the Americas, where ship merchants sold the slaves and European manufactured goods to plantation-owners. Merchants then purchased sugar and molasses from the plantation-owners, and crews...