As wealthy merchants made partnerships with other merchants in the United States and often, England or in the Caribbean, their focus was to create wealth. One interesting fact is that they began to sell rum and other alcohol to Africans. Many Africans did not drink regularly, but associated drinks with ceremonial practices. According to “American Rum, African Consumers, and the Transatlantic Slave Trade” by Sean M. Kelley, American rum trade in Africa had quite a history going back as far as the late nineteenth century. The process involved merchants from New England and included merchants from who distilled West Indian molasses into rum and then traded the alcohol in exchange for Africans who had been taken captives in Africa. The process didn’t stop there—the human capital of African captives was then sold in the Caribbean. The final leg of the process is that the ships then returned with Caribbean products of “sugar, molasses, and bills of exchange on London merchant houses.”
