Triangular trade
The countries that controlled the transatlantic slave market until the 18th century in terms of the number of enslaved people shipped were Great Britain, Portugal, and France.
Merchants purchased raw sugar (often in its liquid form, molasses) from plantations in the Caribbean and shipped it to New England and Europe, where it was sold to distillery companies that produced rum.
Ports that exported these enslaved people from Africa include Ouidah, Lagos, Aného (Little Popo), Grand-Popo, Agoué, Jakin, Porto-Novo, and Badagry.
Slave ships were built to carry large numbers of people, rather than cargo, and variations in the duration of the Atlantic crossing meant that they often arrived in the Americas out-of-season.
Slave ships thus often returned to their home port carrying whatever goods were readily available in the Americas but with a large part or all of their capacity with ballast.
No New England traders are known to have completed a sequential circuit of the full triangle, which took a calendar year on average, according to historian Clifford Shipton.
[11] In the context of an incohesive operation rather than a sequential circuit, expansive eastern seaboard "Farms" had, in earnest after 1690, sustained southern New England proprietorship, land banks, and currency within a Greater Caribbean plantation complex.
Newport carriers, for instance, provisioned Dutch, Danish, and especially French plantations in the Greater Caribbean, periodically more than lackluster British sites, to recompense for hurricane reductions in exports and imports.
[25] Periodic trials and executions of notorious smugglers diminshed royal peacetime embargoes, particularly in response to illegal carrying as well as General Assembly endorsement of Aquidneck as a haven for pirates.
These pirates began to disperse from Newport between Queen Anne's War and 1723 mass executions, establishing the seaport as the dominant carrying hub, with Providence coming in a distant second.
[26][27] Wartime embargoes that reduced overseas trade would, in turn, spur speculative ventures as well as land and estuary auctions of Narragansett tribal reserves, under legislature (public) jurisdiction, by private trusts, a specific type of fiduciary relationship for subsidizing expense accounts, purveying regular annuities, or both.
Bidders at vendue were frequently interior "composite"[28] yeomen and fishermen,[29] who (according to certain historians) misconceived[30] of revenue derived from the carrying trade as income "competency."
[31] Despite the antebellum rise of "Greater Northeast" industrial agriculture,[32] the southern New England "Farms" and the carrying trade[33] in Caribbean sugar, molasses, rice, coffee, indigo, mahogany, and pre-1740 "seasoned slaves",[34] began to dissipate by the Election of 1800[35] and largely collapsed into agrarian ruins by the War of 1812.
[38] According to research provided by Emory University[39] as well as Henry Louis Gates Jr., an estimated 12.5 million slaves were transported from Africa to colonies in North and South America.
