Dear Melissa:
        Here are some of my more specific thoughts on the matter of the
Triangular Trade.
        The bibliographical listing which Jose C. Curto provided and the
suggestions made by Charles Amber, Ron Roizon, and K. Austin Kerr are all
excellent.  Certainly, if you should read all of these works, you will
have a very good appreciation of the linkages between sugar/rum/slaves and
the triangular connection between Europe/West Africa/The Americas.  But,
as Charles Amber indicates, "there is no good study ... that deals
centrally with this question."  For those interested in the subject, this
lack of centrality is frustrating and the resulting discouragement is
evident in David Fahey's recent review of Gutzke's work.  I am of the
opinion that the root cause of this lack of centrality may be, not a lack
of interest but, an unfocused historical lense.
        If you examine Curto's bibliography, for example, you will find
that the connecting points of the geographical triangle are well covered
in the literature.  Your reading of these works will, therefore, provide a
broad understanding of the New World connection between sugar, rum,
slaves, planters, and traders.  If you extend your readings into one
boundary of the triangle and add to that list recent American literature
on Native peoples and their experiences with alcohol in the fur trade, a
further dimension will be added (see especially Peter Mancall's _Deadly
Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America_ and Willam E. Unrau's
_White Man's Wicked Water: The Alcohol Trade and Prohibition in Indian
Country, 1802-1892_).  The point is that, from the beginning of the
mid-seventeenth century rum provides an important thematic link to the
subsequent social experiences of European, African, and Indian peoples.
        I am concerned, however, that we do not really have much of an
understanding of the people who made rum such an important staple in the
triangle's economy.  Richard Dunn, in _Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the
Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713_ offers a good
description of that emerging social world.  John McCusker's work provides
insight into the economic importance of rum in the West Indian trading
system (although it should also be noted that Peter Mancall and other
historians are now questioning McCusker's estimates of the quantities
traded).  More recently in _Citizens of the World: London Merchants and
the integration of the British Atlantic community, 1735-1785_ David
Hancock has produced a magisterial work which clearly outlines how the
British Atlantic community was integrated.  Hancock is more concerned with
establishing the preeminent achievements of a group of outsiders to the
British trading establishment during the eighteenth century but, in the
process, he has unwittingly succeeded in giving credit to sugar, rum, and
to the West Indian slave, planter and trade experiences which shaped the
majority of these giants of imperial expansion.  My sense is that a
growing body of literature is pointing historians to the islands of the
West Indies, the geographic center of the triangular trade in sugar, rum,
and slaves, not to mention a few other items such as tobacco, cotton, and
spices.
        I suspect that an essential key to understanding the New World,
its idealism, trade, and social structure, the emergence of empire, and
the subsequent divergent colonial experiences of its many parts, lies
locked in the largely unsung history of those planter and slave outsiders
who occupied insignificant Caribbean islands, especially Barbados, St.
Kitts, and Nevis / Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao / Martinique, Guadeloupe,
and Haiti, just to name a few.  The problem is that the history of these
useless islands cannot be approached from an eurocentric perspective for,
the Europeans involved in those islands, whether they were Puritan or
pirate, Nobleman or novice, quickly adopted behaviours which were most
un-European.  Nor can that history be centered on the United States of
America, because the institutions and ideals (e.g. slavery versus freedom)
which became a part of the American social structure all flourished in the
West Indies before they were transplated by many an un-European (read West
Indian) trader and planter to the Middle colonies, the Chesapeake, and the
South of the United States.
        The West Indies is a paradox, a vague entity which cannot be
defined racially or ethnically.  Its political, economic, and social
history does not conform to or fit in with the historical expectation of
progress.  In the larger history of civilization, it is an undefined
cultural area which has achieved little.  Yet, it deserves to be studied
more closely for one simple reason; it was on the shores of those islands
that Columbus first set foot and, if we are to pursue the story
historically, we will have to rediscover a more germane perspective of
place, space, and time.  By adopting such an approach to the history of
the New World, the lense through which we view Frederick Jackson Turner's
frontier would be somewhat sharpened.  Bit by bit, we would be able to
follow the un-European aspects of that frontier as it expanded outward in
several directions, marshalling forces from each corner of the Atlantic
world and, in the process, transforming and bequeathing to the rest of the
world new ways of doing things.
        In ending, I think it only fair to advise you that, like all
historians, my views on these issues are biased.  I was born in the Dutch
West Indies.  By the time I reached maturity I had experienced many years
dealing in the languages and cultures of the French, Spanish, and British
islands.  Further, I am one of those confusing people who has spent a
quarter of a century in North America where I am referred to as "black" or
Afro-something, although I do know that racially I'm a composite of
African, European, Carib, and East Indian.  In short, I am West Indian,
despite my Canadian children's insistence that I'm Canadian.
 
Anatol L. Scott
Department of History and Classics
University of Alberta.