Three legs
Europe - Africa. Cloth, metal, weapons, and alcohol. All of this was exchanged along the coast for people captured inland.
Africa - the Americas. The most horrific leg, known as the Middle Passage. Weeks and months in the hold, with extremely high death rates.
The Americas - Europe. Sugar, rum, cotton, and tobacco: plantation goods produced by the people brought there. The cargo returned to where everything had begun.
And again. The profits were invested in a new voyage. Each leg generated income, which is why the system proved so resilient.
The economic point was that no leg was empty. Ordinary trade involved an empty return journey; here, every section of the route carried cargo, sharply increasing profitability.
The triangle itself is a simplification. Real routes were more complex: some ships sailed directly, there were other hubs, and sugar and rum moved along their own circuits.
What lay behind it
The system linked three continents into one network, where the product of one place paid for life elsewhere. Sugar and cotton, which became everyday goods in Europe, were cheap precisely because plantation labor went unpaid.
The Middle Passage deserves special mention. Conditions in the holds are documented: crowding, no room to move, and disease; deaths during the journey amounted to a significant share of those being transported.
The system operated for about three centuries and affected millions of people. Its demographic, economic, and cultural consequences shaped the development of entire regions on both sides of the ocean.
It is also worth remembering who took part. Local states were also involved in capturing people inland, exchanging prisoners for European goods - and without this link, the system would not have worked.
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Sources
- The transatlantic trading system of the 16th-19th centuries is described as a route carrying cargo on every leg: manufactured goods to Africa, enslaved people to the Americas, and plantation products to Europe
- the triangular pattern is a simplification of the real network of routes. The Middle Passage was characterized by high mortality