The Making of the Triangular Trade Myth

Abstract

HE history of world commerce affords innumerable examples of T triangular patterns of trade, but every schoolboy knows that the triangular trade was the one in rum, slaves, and molasses between colonial New England, Africa, and the West Indies. Popularly believed to have been one of the mainstays of American colonial commerce, this famous triangular trade is, in fact, a myth, for no such pattern of trade existed as a major factor in colonial commerce.' It is also a myth in the sense of possessing mythic appeal, evidently requiring little in the way of evidence to establish itself as historical fact. It was not until the last third of the nineteenth century that historians discovered the triangular trade. Before that time, the only extensive examination of the colonial New England slave trade had been conducted in 1795 by the clergyman and historian Jeremy Belknap of Boston. Belknap wrote forty letters of inquiry to merchants and other prominent persons who had been active during the late colonial