A term often used to describe the commercial link between Europe, Africa, and the Americas, each leg of the journey representing part of a triangle. In fact, trade in enslaved Africans was often bilateral between the Americas and Africa, and the trade usually involved goods such as textiles and cowrie shells for money that came from the Indian Ocean. Hence the term is a misnomer, although it is intended to suggest that trade goods and capital for the development of the resources of the Americas came largely from Europe, while the labor for that development was heavily dependent upon enslaved Africans.