AP U.S. History · Lesson 2

Atlantic trade and the growth of slavery

Know Know it

England ran its empire on mercantilism: a nation grows rich by exporting more than it imports, and colonies exist to supply raw materials and buy the home country's goods. The Navigation Acts (from 1651) required colonial trade to use English or colonial ships and sent "enumerated" goods such as tobacco only to England or other English colonies.

The colonies were linked into an Atlantic trade network. The Chesapeake sent tobacco, the lower South rice and indigo, the middle colonies grain, and New England fish, lumber and ships. Many colonial goods went to the Caribbean sugar islands, which bought food and timber and sent molasses back to be made into rum. In return, colonists imported British manufactured goods.

Colonists bent these rules. Smuggling was common, and in the early 1700s Britain's loose enforcement, later called salutary neglect, let colonial assemblies and merchants manage much of their own business. When King James II tried tighter control through the Dominion of New England (1686 to 1689), colonists overthrew it after England's Glorious Revolution.

Slavery grew across the colonies. Enslaved Africans endured the Middle Passage, a crossing in which crowding and disease killed many. Colonies then wrote slavery into law step by step. Virginia's 1662 law made a child's status follow the mother's, so slavery became hereditary, and later laws tied slavery to race and stripped enslaved people of rights. Slavery was largest in the South, but by the early 1700s it was legal in every colony; enslaved people worked on New York's docks and in New England households. Only Georgia, founded in 1732, banned it at first, from 1735 until 1751.

Enslaved people resisted in many ways: slowing work, running away, keeping African traditions and, at times, rebelling. In the Stono Rebellion (1739), enslaved South Carolinians killed whites and marched south toward Spanish Florida, which promised freedom; the colony answered with harsher laws.

Trap The triangle is a simplification

Textbooks sometimes describe one neat triangle of trade. Real ships followed many routes, and much colonial trade ran directly between the mainland colonies and the Caribbean. On a question about trade, tie each region to its own exports rather than reciting a single triangle.

Worked example Easy

Under mercantilism, England valued its American colonies mainly as

  1. independent nations that England should trade with as full equals
  2. places to send all of England's farmers
  3. sources of raw materials and markets for English goodsAnswer
  4. rivals that English merchants should avoid

How to solve it

  1. Recall the goal of mercantilism: export more than you import.
  2. Colonies help by supplying raw materials and buying finished goods.

Why each choice is right or wrong

  • A. Incorrect. Mercantilism treated colonies as possessions that served England, not as independent trading equals.
  • B. Incorrect. England did not aim to send all of its farmers abroad; colonies mattered for trade, not for emptying England.
  • C. Correct. Colonies were meant to supply raw goods such as tobacco and timber and to buy English manufactured goods.
  • D. Incorrect. Mercantilism wanted English merchants to control colonial trade, not to avoid the colonies as rivals.

Explain Explain it

Task verbs: explain, describe

To explain a law's purpose, name the rule and then the group it helped. For example, the Molasses Act of 1733 put a high duty on molasses from the French islands, to help British sugar planters in the Caribbean sell their own.

Worked example Medium

New England merchants shipped fish, flour and lumber to the British sugar islands of the Caribbean mainly because those islands

  1. had already cut down all their forests to build ships
  2. were barred by law from buying any goods made in England
  3. devoted most of their land to sugar and had to import food and woodAnswer
  4. grew their own grain but lacked any skilled carpenters

How to solve it

  1. Ask what the islands produced: sugar, on nearly all their good land.
  2. Ask what they lacked: food for a large enslaved workforce and wood.
  3. New England supplied both.

Why each choice is right or wrong

  • A. Incorrect. The islands did not build ships on any scale; they needed wood for barrels and buildings, not for a shipbuilding industry.
  • B. Incorrect. No law barred the islands from buying English goods; mercantilism encouraged exactly that.
  • C. Correct. Planters used nearly all good land for cane, so the islands bought food for enslaved workers and wood for barrels and buildings.
  • D. Incorrect. The sugar islands did not grow their own grain; feeding their workers is why they imported food.

Explain Your turn

Name one rule set by the English Navigation Acts. Then explain how that rule was meant to benefit England.

Write it, then compare. Nothing you type here is saved or graded.

Compare with a model answer

A full answer does this

  • Names an accurate rule of the Navigation Acts
  • Explains how that rule benefited England

Model answer

One rule required that enumerated colonial goods, such as tobacco, be shipped only to England or other English colonies. This meant English merchants bought and resold the tobacco instead of Dutch traders, and the crown collected customs duties as it passed through English ports.

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