2.4 Transatlantic Trade

Mercantilism was the main economic theory of European empires. It held that a nation grows powerful by exporting more than it imports and building up gold and silver. In that view, colonies existed to help the home country: they supplied raw materials like tobacco, sugar, rice, timber and furs, and they bought the home country's manufactured goods.

Mercantilism meant the British government had a strong interest in controlling colonial trade so that profits flowed to Britain rather than to rivals like the Dutch or French.

Parliament passed a series of Navigation Acts beginning in 1651 and especially after 1660. They required that colonial trade be carried on English or colonial ships, that certain 'enumerated' goods such as tobacco, sugar and indigo be shipped only to England, and that most European goods headed to the colonies pass through England first, where they could be taxed.

The acts benefited colonial shipbuilders and gave colonists a protected market, but they raised prices and limited where colonists could sell. Colonists often responded by smuggling. The Molasses Act of 1733, which taxed molasses from French and Dutch islands, was widely ignored. Because Britain enforced trade laws loosely for decades, a policy later called salutary neglect, many colonists grew used to bending the rules.

Britain's one major attempt to tighten control, the Dominion of New England (1686–1689), merged several northern colonies under a royal governor, Sir Edmund Andros, and suspended their assemblies. Colonists overthrew Andros after England's Glorious Revolution of 1688, which showed how much they valued their own assemblies.

Historians use the term triangular trade to describe how Atlantic routes linked three regions. In one common pattern, New England rum went to West Africa to buy enslaved people, enslaved Africans were shipped to the West Indies, and West Indian sugar and molasses went back to New England to make more rum. Another pattern ran from Britain to Africa to the Americas and back. In reality, many voyages were simple back-and-forth trips, so the 'triangle' is a simplification.

The Middle Passage was the voyage of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic, the middle leg of the triangle. People were chained in crowded, filthy holds for weeks or months. Across the whole history of the trade, about 12.5 million Africans were forced onto ships and about 10.7 million survived the crossing, so roughly one in seven died at sea.

• Port cities such as Boston, Newport, New York, Philadelphia and Charleston grew rich on trade, and a merchant class rose.
• Colonists bought more British goods such as cloth, tea and dishes, which tied them culturally to Britain (see 2.7).
• Every region, including New England, profited from slavery through shipping, supplies or plantation crops.
• The trade in people included Native Americans too. Carolina traders bought thousands of Native captives taken in wars between Native nations and shipped many of them to the West Indies.
• Experience with smuggling and loose enforcement set up resentment when Britain began enforcing trade laws strictly after 1763.