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.