Western Civilization II / Unit 4 WC2 0327 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Reading a Map of the Triangle Trade
The idea
The exam shows a map of the Atlantic with three arrows and asks what moved along one of them, or which leg was the Middle Passage. Three questions read any such map: what leaves Europe, what leaves Africa, and what leaves the Americas. The triangle's logic is that each leg pays for the next.
In practice
Three arrows. Europe to Africa: manufactured goods, cloth, metal, guns, traded for captives. Africa to the Americas: the enslaved, the Middle Passage, the witness's red arrow, five to six hundred to a ship with ten to twenty percent expected to die. The Americas to Europe: sugar first, then tobacco, coffee, indigo, rice, the products of enslaved labor, sold to pay for the next cargo of manufactures. A fourth arrow the witness draws inside the Americas: molasses from the Caribbean to Massachusetts, distilled into rum. Read the destinations too: forty-two percent to the Caribbean, thirty-eight to Brazil, a few percent to the mainland colonies.
Where people slip
The Middle Passage is the second leg, not the first, and it runs from Africa, not to it. A map that shows slaves leaving Europe is wrong; a question that calls the trade European-to-American forgets that captives were bought on the African coast, mostly from African slavers.
Your place on the trail
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