Labor and Trade in Colonial America When textbooks discuss
colonial labor practices, they most often associate the concept
of labor with male work done outside the physical boundaries of
the home—in fields; on docks; in warehouses; on ships. Labor is
associated with creating goods for market, allowing men to
participate in the "triangle trade"—a network of trade
relationships in which raw materials flowed from the Americas to
Europe, manufactured goods moved from Europe to Africa, and
enslaved Africans were shipped back to the Americas. Yet this
framing oversimplifies the complex history of labor in colonial
America. It overlooks female labor as central, not peripheral,
to the survival of familial and colonial economies alike. It
ignores the fact that different patterns of labor existed in
Native communities, and that non-Native opinions of Native labor
practices influenced colonial Indian policy. It also
oversimplifies the complex web of international trade
relationships that wove together the Atlantic world