The Triangle Trade

New England's thin, glacial soil and short summers ruled out the plantation agriculture that enriched the colonies farther south; its farms barely feed its own people. The region's wealth lay instead offshore and in its forests. Fishing fleets worked the North Atlantic banks and brought home far more cod than the colonies could consume, dried and salted for export. Whalers supplied whale oil for lamps, and timber fed the shipyards of Boston and Newport. Those yards launched your greatest asset: 7 merchant ships, the largest fleet in the colonies.

Your most profitable export is rum, distilled in Rhode Island from West Indian molasses (the by-product of sugar refining), which means your best product depends on someone else's. The game's rule reflects that cost: each unit of rum you trade consumes 2 molasses. Sugar planters, who devoted nearly every acre to cane, paid well for dried fish and lumber. You in turn are short of farm crops and of the manufactured goods the Navigation Acts routed through England. When Parliament's Molasses Act of 1733 taxed molasses from the French islands, New England merchants largely smuggled it, an early sign of how colonists treated trade laws they disliked. Your fleet is a second business, called the carrying trade: the Southern Colonies and the West Indies own no ships, so every cargo they send must travel in someone's hold. Make it yours and charge for it. You begin with no molasses, so your rum sits idle until you secure some, and in this market your whale oil, your rum, and your hulls are worth more than fish and lumber. Work out the most profitable circuit you can.

The tidy version of this story places slavery in the South and the Caribbean. The account books say otherwise. At sea and in the shipyards the labor fell to fishermen, whalers, sailors, and shipwrights, many of them poor and some of them enslaved. The molasses in New England rum was produced by enslaved people on sugar plantations, and the poorest-grade fish was shipped south as cheap food for them. Rhode Island merchants, many sailing from Newport, organized more slave-trading voyages than those of any other mainland colony: rum went to West Africa, captive Africans were forced aboard, and the ships carried them through the Middle Passage (the forced Atlantic crossing) to be sold in the Caribbean. Enslaved people also lived and worked in Boston and Newport. The North's prosperity was built into the same system as the South's.

The Middle Colonies were the breadbasket of British America: harvests of wheat and corn far exceeded what the colonists consumed, and the surplus left Philadelphia and New York as grain, flour, and salted meat. Some tobacco grows in Delaware, though never enough to export. Add cattle, abundant lumber, and a fur trade with Native American nations whose pelts commanded high prices in London, and higher still on the European continent, though the Navigation Acts required that furs pass through England first. Your merchant fleet numbers 2 ships, enough to trade independently but not lavishly.

That is the first limit on your strategy. The second is the nature of your goods: useful to everyone, but bulky and cheap per shipload. You are short of manufactured goods, which English law reserved to English makers, and of the tropical commodities your climate cannot grow. The sophisticated play is indirect. Sugar commands extraordinary prices in England. Convert your wheat into West Indian sugar, then convert that sugar into English manufactures, and you have multiplied the value of your harvest twice. Work out the most profitable chain of trades you can.

The tidy version calls this region the colonies' pantry and stops there. At home, the pantry's labor came from farm families, from indentured servants bound to years of work for their passage, and from enslaved people on larger farms and estates. Follow the flour, though, and it leads to the cane fields. Sugar islands devoted so much land to cane that they imported their food, so Middle Colonies grain fed the enslaved people forced to work there, and colonial lumber and livestock built and powered the sugar mills. Those people had survived the Middle Passage, the forced crossing of the Atlantic that killed many of the captives packed below deck. Slavery was also part of daily life here. New York City had one of the largest enslaved populations of any colonial city, and Pennsylvania's Quaker merchants held enslaved people as well. Yet it was also in Pennsylvania, in 1688, that a small group of Germantown Quakers wrote one of the first protests against slavery in the colonies, which shows that people at the time could see the wrong clearly.

The South is rich in goods and poor in transport. Tobacco, the great cash crop, is grown in such quantity that the English market is glutted. South Carolina adds rice, silk, and indigo, a blue dye so prized by English cloth-makers that Parliament paid a bounty for it from 1748. North Carolina supplies lumber and naval stores (the pine tar and resin every wooden ship needs). Maryland contributes fish, and the backcountry fur trade rounds out eight distinct goods, the most diverse inventory in the game. Your ports are Charleston and Savannah, and you own no ships.

Under heavy duties the price of tobacco collapsed to about a penny a pound, while buyers on the European continent who would pay far more were walled off by the Navigation Acts. You are short of food grains and manufactured goods, and none of your surplus moves on its own. Every negotiation therefore carries a freight question: who carries the cargo, and at what price? Hire a hull from New England, the Middle Colonies, or England, or trade for a ship outright, but solve that first, because unsold tobacco wins nothing. Then work out the best trades you can.

The dependence ran deep enough that planters described it as a kind of bondage. Thomas Jefferson wrote that Virginia's tobacco growers fell so far into debt to British merchants that they became “a species of property, annexed to certain mercantile houses in London” (Thomas Jefferson, 1786). The phrase is striking because the men who used it held people as actual property. The tobacco, rice, and indigo were planted and harvested by enslaved people, many of them survivors of the Middle Passage (the forced Atlantic crossing); more captive Africans entered through Charleston than through any other mainland port. The tidy version leaves out their knowledge and their resistance. Carolina planters sought out captives from the rice-growing regions of West Africa for their skill. And in 1739, enslaved people near the Stono River rose up and marched toward Spanish Florida, which had promised freedom to those who escaped.

The West Indies were the engine of the Atlantic economy. On Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua, and St. Kitts, sugar commanded prices no mainland crop could touch, and planters devoted so much land to cane that they imported even their food rather than spare an acre. Molasses, sugar's by-product, fed New England's distilleries; citrus, a sideline, helped keep sailors healthy at sea. Your principal ports are Kingston (Jamaica) and Bridgetown (Barbados), and you own no ships.

That concentration is your advantage: everyone wants what you have, and New England cannot trade its rum without your molasses. It is also your weakness. You are short of food and manufactured goods, and you have no vessels to fetch them, so you must hire New England, Middle Colony, or English ships, or trade for one outright. French, Spanish, and Dutch islands undercut your prices, so English colonial loyalty is your lifeline; planters lobbied Parliament for the Molasses Act of 1733 to tax their rivals' molasses. Price your sugar as the scarce good it is, and work out the best trades you can.

That profit was extracted through slavery on an industrial scale. Enslaved Africans, forcibly transported through the Middle Passage (the forced Atlantic crossing), performed the dangerous labor of the cane fields and boiling houses, and by the mid-1700s made up about nine in ten of Jamaica's people. Olaudah Equiano, carried across the Atlantic as a boy, remembered the voyage this way: “I now wished for the last friend, death, to relieve me” (Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative, 1789). Sugar work was so deadly that on many islands deaths outnumbered births for generations, and planters kept buying newly captured Africans rather than change how they worked people. Enslaved people resisted, from daily refusals to open revolt; in Jamaica, communities of escaped people called Maroons fought the British until a treaty in 1739 recognized their freedom.

You represent England's merchants and the government behind them. The guns, gunpowder, tools, books, clothing, and fine furniture the colonies buy come almost entirely from English workshops, and you also hold silver. Your port is London, and your 8 merchant ships are the largest fleet in the game.

You operate the machinery of mercantilism, the doctrine that colonies exist to enrich the Mother Country. The Navigation Acts, beginning in 1651, confined colonial trade to English ships and routed the most valuable colonial goods through England, so manufactured goods sell dear and raw materials buy cheap; the difference is empire. Yet the empire runs on colonial goods. The fleet consumes the products of colonial forests, London buyers demand colonial cash crops, and your import list is as long as any colony's. Dominance is not self-sufficiency. Trade manufactures for raw materials, sell space in your holds to the shipless regions, and work out the most profitable trades you can.

Even at the time, critics saw the design plainly. Adam Smith wrote: “To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers, may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers.” (Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776). The manufactures themselves came from English weavers, gunsmiths, and ironworkers, laboring long hours for low wages. What the tidy version of mercantilism leaves out is the people forced aboard on the second leg. In the 1700s British ships carried more captive Africans across the Atlantic than those of any other nation. Cloth, guns, and metal goods went to West Africa; captives were forced through the Middle Passage (the forced Atlantic crossing) and sold into slavery; sugar and tobacco grown by enslaved people came home. Liverpool and Bristol built their docks and fortunes on that circuit.