ABSTRACT
The history of world commerce affords innumerable examples of triangular patterns of trade, but every schoolboy knows that the triangular trade was the one in rum, slaves, and molasses between colonial New England, Africa, and the West Indies. Popularly believed to have been one of the mainstays of American colonial commerce, this famous triangular trade is, a myth, for no such pattern of trade existed as a major factor in colonial commerce. The history of the triangular trade as a historical “fact” may be said to have begun in 1866 with the publication of George H. Moore’s Notes on the History of Slavery in Massachusetts. The triangular trade myth first gained popular currency in the brief and widely read The American Slave Trade by the journalist, John R. Spears, in 1900. In 1887 the businessman-historian William Babcock Weeden, like Mason a Rhode Islander, reconstructed Mason’s article in a paper on the slave trade, delivered before the American Antiquarian Society.
