Dear Jose Curto:
 
        Overall, we seem to be more in agreement than disagreement.  Your
first point, that the Triangular Trade is a misnomer, is well taken
especially since it was my desire to raise the question as to whether this
term, as discussed in the historical literature, is not incorrect and
misleading.  Being a novice to the profession, I have to maintain a
certain amount of decorum; I therefore hesitated to put the matter as
bluntly as you stated it.
        Your subsequent statement that "there was, in fact, much more
bilateral trade between the Americas (including the Caribbean) and Africa
than the term implies" is also supportive but, on carefully considering
it, I sense a bit of a methodological problem in including the Caribbean
with the Americas.  Those people who inhabited the Caribbean, in the
seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries did not consider
themselves or their flourishing trade subordinate to that of North or
South America.  Indeed, it is more accurate to say that, for most of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they were the foremost traders in
the New World and their relatives in the Imperial government certainly
considered them far more important than traders in the rest of the
Americas.  The matter of inclusion becomes more of a problem when we
consider that, for most of the nineteenth and all of the twentieth
centuries, areas of the Caribbean continued to be recognized and treated
as ditinct entities with differeing colonial provenance.  As a result,
when economists came to consider the Caribbean and its trade, they treated
these areas separately and most particularly, they did not include them in
the trading system of the Americas.  In the 1940s, in _Capitalism and
Slavery_, Eric Williams attempted to give the area greater significance by
economically integrating it into the larger history.  I need not recall
the massive amount of scholarship which English and American historians
launched in an attempt to disprove that very West Indian thesis.  Given
this background, why do we historians lump Caribbean trade in whith that
of the Americas while, at the same time, conveniently exclude the area
from most social and/or political debates? From my perspective, unless we
are prepared to include all historical aspects of the Caribbean in the
discussion of triangular history, we ought not to make mention of it or,
at least, we should begin to pay greater attention to the work of those
(especially) American historians who have championed the area.
        Apart from this technicality, however, I wonder how the "New
England traders, the Caribbean rum traders, and the Brazilian rum-tobacco
traders in the Atlantic slave trade" fit together.  This is something that
needs to be discussed, particularly in U.S. history.  When I read Perry
Miller's, Bernard Bailyn's and a host of other historical works on the
U.S., the questions about the Puritans which assail my mind are multifold.
If these men (and women) were really so great and if they thought such
idealistic, other-worldly, and synthetic republican thoughts: why is it
that, for two centuries, they and their relations were the foremost
privateers, rum runners, and slave traders in the Caribbean? When I think
of their multiple connections to the Dutch during that period, I'm also
assailed by a number of other considerations.  It was the Dutch who
introduced Barbadians (among whom were a significant number of Puritans)
to sugar and the technicalities of producing rum in the 1620s.  The Dutch
also introduced the early tobacco planters to the tremendous benefit of
slavery and provided the slaves for the Barbadians.
        How does the slave factory of the Dutch ABC islands of
Aruba/Bonaire/Curacao, which fattened slaves for the Brazilian market,
connect with Barbados and its tremendous wealth by the 1640s.  Why, in
the late 1640s and early 1650s, would politically aware Barbadian planters
defy Cromwell and a deposed King, declare their neutrality and their
freedom of choice, in language so much like that of the American
Declaration of Independence (one hundred and more years later), and insist
on their right to trade freely with the Dutch because of the economic and
service benefits which such trade provided? Given that Curacao and New
Amsterdam were intimately connected, since controlled by the same
governor, should I not ask whether the Dutch were the ones who provided
slaves for early Southern planters, in the same way that they provided
them for Barbadians, the Spaniards, and Brazilians? Given further that
Barbadians played such an important role in settling the Carolinas, is it
not fair to ask whether they also settled other areas, whether they
brought slaves from Barbados with them, whether some of their slaves had
been provided by the Dutch and whether, as West Indian folklore suggests,
most of the early slaves who moved to the United States with their masters
had been "seasoned" before being transported there? While we are seeking
answers to these questions, it seems also fair to ask: what was the
relationship between Caribbean and New England/Middle colonies traders?
Which end of this symbiotic relationship was the horse and which was the
tail? How can we explain the rise to power and the prominence in American
history of the man from tiny Nevis, Alexander Hamilton.  What was this
man's ethicity and, at a time when ethnicity is such a powerful analytic
tool, how do we identify other men like Hamilton.  Indeed, how do we
account for the political and economic ideas Hamilton imposed on
Americans?
        Will answers to such questions help to explain anything about the
two solitudes which developed in the United States? I think they do, but
we shall never know unless we ask.  We will not know until we find a way
to incorporate all people of the Caribbean triangle into American and
Canadian history.  The story of rum offers us one way to begin focussing
on these issues.  But can we discuss it without the subject being waylaid
by the grand North American morality play, the discussion of slavery? I
recognize that rum-slavery and the Brazilian traffic is important but,
from my perspective, when the Dutch offered Barbadians an extremely
effective Brazilian system of production and trade, they opened a new can
of worms, one which was subsequently passed to the British, to the
detriment of the French.  Out of that can of worms the North American
empire emerged, separate and distinct from the South American.
 
Anatol L. Scott
Department of History and Classics
University of Alberta.