The trade started because Europe wanted to expand its empires in the New World and the major resouce that they were lacking was a work force. At first they tried to use indigneous people but they weren't reliable because most of them were dying from diseases brought from and Europeans were use to the climate and were suffering from tropical diseases. They began using Africans to do their work because they were great workers, they often had experience of agriculture and keeping cattel, they were used to a tropical climate, resistant to tropical diseases, and they could be "worked very hard" so they said.
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All three stages of the Triangular Trade proved great business for merchants. The first stage of the Triangular Trade involoved taking manufactured goods from Europe to Africa: cloth, spirit, tabacco, beads, cowrie shells, metal goods, and guns. The guns were used to help expand empires and obtain more slaves, they used these goods to exchange for African slaves. The second stage of the triangular Trade which was the middle passage involved shipping the slaves to the Americas. The third and last stage of the Triangular Trade involved the reuturn to Europe with the items from teh slave-labor planations such as cotton, sugar, tobacco, molasses and rum.
Portugal was responsible for transporting over 4.5 million African slaves, for two hundred years Portugal had a monopoly on the export of slaves from Africa. Between 1450 and the end of the nineteenth century, slaves were obtained from along the west coast of Africa. During the eighteenth century, when the slave trade accounted for the transport of a staggering 6 million Africans Britian was the worst transgressor of them all, they were responsible for almost 2.5 million trade accounts. This fact is often forgotten by those who regularly cite Britian's prime role in the abolition of the slave trade.
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