The Triangular Slave Trade and its Effects.

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Ada Rivera

Mr. Hamstra

AP World History Pd 2

January 8th, 2012

Triangular Trade Change and Continuity essay

Although the triangular trade transported slaves throughout countless lands, it reached massive proportions and changes on society.

 The earliest European slave traders were Portuguese explorers who reconnoitered the west African coast in the mid-fifteenth century. In Europe African slaves usually worked as miners, porters, or domestic servants, since free peasants and serfs cultivated the land. Sugar planters on the island of Sao Tomé in particular called for slaves in increasing quantities, they relied on slave labor, and production soared along with the demand for sugar in Europe. By the 1520's some two thoudand slaves per year went to Sao Tomé. Soon thereafter Portuguese entrepreneurs extended the use of slave labor to South America. During 1530 Portuguese planters imported slaves directly from Kongo and Angola to Brazil, which eventually became the wealthiest of the sugar-producing lands of western hemisphere.

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While slavery was cruel and exploitative, for the Europeans were profitable, they obtained money for the slave trade and allowed them to build stronger empires. The demand of labor in the western hemisphere stimulated a profitable commerce known as the triangular trade, on the first leg carried European manufactured goods- mostly cloth and metal wares, especially firearms-that they exchanged in Africa for slaves. The second leg took enslaved Africans to Caribbean and American destinations. Upon arrival merchants sold their human cargoes to plantation owners for two to three times what they had cost on the African coast. Sometimes they changed ...

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