Quotes about Triangular Trade

Christine MacLeod

English merchants were responsible for shipping over three million slaves (half the total) from Africa to the slave plantations of the Caribbean and southern USA, before their trade's abolition by parliament in 1807

H. W. Brands

The historic dearth of labor was perhaps the central feature of the American economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Victor A. Gunasekara

Muslims conducted organized raids into Africa to enslave Negroes. These were then sold in the slave bazaars of Mecca, Baghdad, Tripoli and other places in the Islamic world. This trade was only stopped by the European powers in the nineteenth century.

Ezra Stiles

The British merchants represented that they received some profit indeed from Virginia and South Carolina, as well as the West Indies; but as for the rest of this continent, they were constant losers in trade.

Royal African Company

In 1672, the English trading company, the Company Of Royal Adventurers, rechartered itself changing it name to the Royal African Company to focus on the Slave Trade. By 1687 the company was given the exclusive right to trade between the Gold Coast and the British colonies in America. James, Duke of York, (later to be King James II, was interested in this company, and it agreed to supply the West Indies with three thousand slaves annually. in 1698, on account of the incessant clamor of English merchants, the trade was opened generally, and any vessel carrying the British flag was, by act of Parliament, permitted to engage in it on payment of a duty.

Edward Gibbon

Sixty thousand blacks are annually embarked from the coast of Guinea, never to return to their native country; but they are embarked in chains: and this constant emigration, which, in the space of two centuries, might have furnished armies to overrun the globe, accuses the guilt of Europe and the weakness of Africa.

Michael Oren

In 1776 one-fifth of America’s trade ran through the Middle East and that trade involved, in essence, large barrels of rum from Boston in particular, which were sent out of New England to the Ottoman Empire. There it was dumped and the barrels were filled up with opium. From there, the ships went to China and they dumped the opium in China and filled it up with tea and came back to New England.

This is how the American patriots obtained the tea that was thrown into Boston Harbor during the Boston Tea Party.

John Winthrop

Mr. Pierce in the Salem ship, the Desire, returned from the West Indies after seven months. He had been at Providence, and brought some cotton, and tobacco, and Negroes, etc., from thence, and salt from Tertugos. Dry fish and strong liquors are the only commodities for those parts. He met there two men-of-war, sent forth by the lords, etc., of Providence with letters of mart, who had taken divers prizes from the Spaniard and many Negroes.

This historical quotation enables us to date the importation of slaves into Massachusetts to as early as 1638. It also shows us that even though the Spanish had enslaved Negroes from Africa, when English ships raided Spanish ships and seized their booty, they considered the slaves as property and took them to then sell for the money. Had they had a different point of view, they might have freed the Back slaves who had been captured by their enemy, the Spanish. But they did not and money and money was the major motivation.

Triangular Trade Quotes