An Atlantic Economy Is Built on the Slave Trade

Europe’s empires relied on a triangular trade that wove together North America, the Caribbean, and Africa.

• New England and European merchants sent rum, manufactured goods, and even guns to Africa.
• African traders and rulers sent captured Africans aboard ships to the Americas.
• Plantations in the Caribbean and southern colonies sent sugar, tobacco, rice, indigo, and later cotton back to Europe.

This mercantilist system meant that ports from Boston to Bristol grew rich on slave-produced goods, even if they did not hold slaves themselves. New England distilleries turned Caribbean molasses (a byproduct of slave-grown sugar) into rum. Colonial ship captains traded for enslaved people on the African coast. Thus, Northern merchants – Rhode Island slavers, Massachusetts rum sellers, New York traders – profited in every leg of the trade and helped finance a booming Atlantic economy just like the plantation owners in the U.S. South.

Consumers from London to Lisbon eagerly bought sugar and coffee from slave plantations, and merchants in the North American colonies sold cloth, tools, and rum in return.

• The Slave Trade: European powers used colonies to extract wealth. Lands that became the Americas produced tobacco, rice, indigo, and especially sugar cane. Enslaved Africans grew and harvested these crops in brutal conditions. The raw goods then flowed to Europe, where merchants and consumers enjoyed the fruits of this labor. Meanwhile, manufactured goods and weapons went to Africa in exchange for captives.

• Northern Involvement: New England’s economy was deeply entangled with slavery. For example, Rhode Island ships specialized in carrying enslaved Africans, and wealthy merchants in Boston and New York often owned shares in slave voyages. One historian notes that “New England, Boston, New York City… were shaped by the trafficking of African people”. Northern insurers underwrote voyages, and gristmills and mills in the North processed sugar and molasses shipped up from the plantations. Even though the northern colonies had few slaves themselves, their daily life and prosperity were linked to slave labor far away. European consumers, too, were deeply implicated: the sugar in their tea, the cotton in their cloth, and the tobacco in their pipes were products of enslaved labor.

• Slave-Produced Wealth: The slave plantation was effectively the engine of the Atlantic economy. The great fortunes of merchants and plantation owners – and the capital for the American Revolution – were built on enslaved labor. Plantation products like “Carolina Gold” rice and Carolina indigo, South Carolina’s rice plantations, Virginia’s tobacco, and Caribbean sugar dominated colonial exports. A few Southern elites managed plantations in the U.S. South while attempting to instill racial hierarchies that cultivated racial alliances with poorer whites who did not own slaves. After Bacon’s Rebellion, codifying racial hierarchies in the Southern colonies of what would become the United States to prevent interracial working-class alliances became a priority for the plantation owning elite.

African Resistance to Enslavement

Africans resisted the slave trade and bondage at every turn. In Africa itself, powerful leaders and communities pushed back. A famous example is Queen Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba (in present-day Angola). In the 1600s she led guerrilla warfare against Portuguese colonizers who were capturing and selling her people as slaves. Nzinga famously offered sanctuary to runaway slaves and negotiated (and broke) alliances to keep her kingdoms free. Her story symbolizes how African resistance could disrupt the trade.

• Revolt on the Coast: Throughout West and Central Africa, many resisted both European slave raiders and African middlemen. Coastal kingdoms like Dahomey, Benin, Kongo or Oyo sometimes banned or limited slaving raids out of self-interest; others like Asante and Oyo participated heavily by selling captives from wars. Slaves themselves often resisted by running away or inciting rebellions whenever possible.

• Wider Resistance: Even slaves awaiting shipment used suicide and revolt as forms of defiance. Across Africa, “you either trade or be traded,” one descendant explained, meaning sell captives or be enslaved yourself. Many chose to resist even at great risk, undermining the system of slavery whenever they could.

Resistance on the Middle Passage

The Middle Passage itself – the ocean voyage carrying captives – was a stage of constant struggle. Enslaved Africans faced appalling conditions on slave ships, but they fought back whenever possible. Overcrowded below decks, chained together, many seized every chance to escape. Some starved themselves or jumped overboard to avoid bondage. Others organized mutinies or attacked the crew. While many shipboard revolts were brutally crushed, the very fact that hundreds occurred despite ship designs specifically to present them demonstrates resistance.

Onboard Solidarity: The slave ships were brutal “machines of death,” but they also forced strangers to become family. Enslaved men, women and children came together in chains broadening their sense of family from immediate relatives to everyone on the lower deck. They passed news, encouragement, and even weapons (if any could be seized). In many cases, this communal bond helped organize resistance. For example, several African women once fought off their captor’s overseers for days on end to protect an infant’s life.

Colonial North America and Resistance

Once in the Americas, enslaved people continued to resist in many ways. In the British colonies that became the United States, rebellion and everyday defiance were constant. Early on, some colonies strictly limited slave rights and even forbade educating slaves, but enslaved Africans and African-descended people pushed back in ways we’ll explore in greater depth next week.

Economic Legacy and Complicity

In sum, the Atlantic economy – from textiles in Manchester to shipyards in Boston – depended on slavery. Profits from slave-run plantations built universities, funded banks, and founded industries in the North and Europe. This helps explain why, as one historian notes, the “North made war and peace” for forty years to protect the South’s plantation economy. Even after the Revolutionary War, northern merchants continued to trade in slave-produced goods and finance plantations abroad.

Far from being a Southern phenomenon, slavery’s wealth permeated the whole colonial world. European consumers ate Caribbean sugar and drank rum made by enslaved labor. American shipowners insured cotton crops and provided credit for slave purchases. In New England, distilleries prospered on molasses; merchants invested in Caribbean plantations; and towns like New London and Bristol thrived on transatlantic trade. All of these ties meant that the horrors of the Middle Passage and life on plantations – the “barbaric usage” of slavery – were a hidden foundation beneath everyday prosperity.

In this complex system, resistance took many forms. African women and men in Angola or the Congo fought against slavers; enslaved people on ships formed kinship chains and occasionally revolted; and in America men like Lemuel Haynes and countless others challenged slavery’s logic. The Atlantic slave trade created vast wealth, but it was built on the backs of millions who never stopped resisting. These struggles – Queen Nzinga’s guerrillas, Maroon communities, shipboard mutineers, and American revolutionaries – foreshadowed later fights for freedom (from Haiti to Boston to Richmond). They remind us that even at the height of slavery, people of African and Native American descent worked tirelessly to define America as a land of freedom for all.

References

• Berry, Daina Ramey and Gross, Kali Nicole. A Black Women’s History of the United States: ReVisioning American History, Book 5. Beacon Press, 2020.

• Ortiz, Paul. An African American and Latinx History of the United States. Beacon Press, 2018.

• Rediker, Marcus. The Slave Ship: A Human History. Viking, 2007.

• Taylor, Alan. American Colonies: The Settling of North America. Penguin Press, 2001.

• Stevenson, Bryan. The Transatlantic Slave Trade. Equal Justice Initiative report, 2022.

• Mark, Joshua. “Native American Enslavement in Colonial America.” World History Encyclopedia, 2021.

• Otele, Olivette. African Europeans: An Untold History. Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.

• “Colonial Molasses Trade.” Wikipedia. (Accessed 2025).

• McGhee, Fred L. Review of The Slave Ship, African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter, Vol. 11, No. 2 (2008).