It’s high time we start to set the record straight

If you teach history to 5th, 8th, or 11th graders, open your textbook and turn to the section on the Triangle Trade, the notorious commercial route between Europe, West Africa, and North America. Found those pages? OK, now tear them out. The trade pattern described

in your text is completely misleading, and scholars have known that for at least 30 years. The real Triangle Trade, which spurred the sale of an estimated 12.5 million slaves during the 17th and 18th centuries, was spherical, touching almost the entire globe. I recently stumbled on that revelation while I was working on a book about the history of sugar with my wife, Marina Budhos.

In The Diligent: A Voyage through the Worlds of the Slave Trade (Basic Bks., 2001), historian Robert Harms traces the route of a French slave-trading ship in 1731. Harms discovered that 40 percent of the vessel’s cargo consisted of Indian textiles and cowrie shells from the Maldive Islands. I began to wonder just how important Indian textiles were to the slave trade. The short answer is that for the French, Dutch, and English—the chief traffickers of slaves to the New World—Indian goods made up roughly 36 to 40 percent of their cargoes. At the very least, the Triangle Trade traveled east before heading south. But that’s not the whole story.

Years ago, I’d done some research on the English East India Company, the British trading company that came to rule much of India. So I knew how difficult it was for the British to get the Indian textiles they wanted. While there were some takers for English woolens (to line slippers, make cloaks, or cover saddles), those sales wouldn’t generate enough revenue to purchase the vast quantities of textiles that England needed. What could the English offer the Indians? What would entice them? Silver. Ultimately, the massive quantity of ore that the Spanish forced the Bolivians to mine at Silver Mountain, or Cerro Rico, was the key to the whole trade system (not European manufactured goods, as is mistakenly believed).

Although the textbook authors got their facts wrong, here’s the great news: it was ridiculously easy for me to uncover the true story. Since the 1970s, diligent scholars worldwide have been mapping out every aspect of this trade in textiles, shells, silver, and human beings, and there’s an abundance of materials available. So once teachers throw away those misleading old charts, they can easily replace them with richly detailed, up-to-date studies. Then they can tackle another really interesting question: Why have we gotten this story wrong for so long?

My hunch is that it reflects our Eurocentric perspective. Maps that show the old trade originating in Europe imply that European goods were coveted all over the world. European guns were highly prized, but so, too, were Indian textiles. Recognizing that Europe needed India’s goods and didn’t have much to offer in return requires letting go of that Eurocentric presumption.

Those of us who were students in the 1960s saw the Civil Rights Movement change the world. Our eyes were opened to the devastating effects of racism, slavery, and violence, and those perceptions transformed our view of history and our lives. Every time today’s students go online, they’re exposed to global ideas and peoples and connections that are transforming their understanding of the world in a way that makes sense to them. They’re finding their history, the same way we found ours. To help them along, all we educators need to do is to look at the scholarship that already exists, ask questions, and connect the dots. Our students have the opportunity to discover a past as fresh and alive as their curiosity—and we should celebrate that with a great, national, ripping sound.