The triangle trade and the colonial table, sugar, tea, and slavery: learning resources

Najważniejsze kwestie

• The history of sugar stretches from India and the Middle East, where it was first grown, to the New World, where it was cultivated by Christopher Columbus and other Europeans. Until the 16th century, when Europe began importing sugar from the Americas, sugar was reserved for the elite in Europe, because it was both rare and expensive.
• A global trade developed around sugar in the 15th and 16th centuries, bolstered by the growing popularity of tea, coffee, chocolate, and punch in Europe. Its expanded production in the New World depended on the labor of enslaved people, many abducted in Africa, to harvest and process sugar cane. Molasses, a byproduct of sugar production, was an important commodity in the triangle trade.
• When tea imported from China became popular in Europe and the Americas in the 1600s, many of the objects associated with the tea service were inspired by objects also imported from China (in this case, the silver sugar bowl is formed in the shape of a Chinese rice bowl). The sugar itself was part of trade exchanges between Africa, the Americas (and the West Indies), and Europe.
• Both the form and the function of this bowl reflect the elite status of its owner. The use of silver for this bowl reflects the expensive nature of sugar, even in the 18th century; its delicate design suggests that it was the work of a master silversmith.

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