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Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War
Traditional accounts of the making of the modern world afford a place of primacy to European history. Some credit the fifteenth-century Age of Discovery and the maritime connection it established between West and East; others the accidental unearthing of the “New World.” Still others point to the development of the scientific method, or the spread of Judeo-Christian beliefs; and so on, ad infinitum. The history of Africa, by contrast, has long been relegated to the remote outskirts of our global story. What if, instead, we put Africa and Africans at the very center of our thinking about the origins of modernity?
In a sweeping narrative spanning more than six centuries, Howard W. French does just that, for Born in Blackness vitally reframes the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the economic ascendancy of Europe, the anchoring of democracy in the West, and the fulfillment of so-called Enlightenment ideals all grew out of Europe’s dehumanizing engagement with the “dark” continent. In fact, French reveals, the first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not—as we are so often told, even today—Europe’s yearning for ties with Asia, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge a trade in gold with legendarily rich Black societies sequestered away in the heart of West Africa.
Creating a historical narrative that begins with the commencement of commercial relations between Portugal and Africa in the fifteenth century and ends with the onset of World War II, Born in Blackness interweaves precise historical detail with poignant, personal reportage. In so doing, it dramatically retrieves the lives of major African historical figures, from the unimaginably rich medieval emperors who traded with the Near East and beyond, to the Kongo sovereigns who heroically battled seventeenth-century European powers, to the ex-slaves who liberated Haitians from bondage and profoundly altered the course of American history.
While French cogently demonstrates the centrality of Africa to the rise of the modern world, Born in Blackness becomes, at the same time, a far more significant narrative, one that reveals a long-concealed history of trivialization and, more often, elision in depictions of African history throughout the last five hundred years. As French shows, the achievements of sovereign African nations and their now-far-flung peoples have time and again been etiolated and deliberately erased from modern history. As the West ascended, their stories—siloed and piecemeal—were swept into secluded corners, thus setting the stage for the hagiographic “rise of the West” theories that have endured to this day.
“Capacious and compelling” (Laurent Dubois), Born in Blackness is epic history on the grand scale. In the lofty tradition of bold, revisionist narratives, it reframes the story of gold and tobacco, sugar and cotton—and of the greatest “commodity” of them all, the twelve million people who were brought in chains from Africa to the “New World,” whose reclaimed lives shed a harsh light on our present world.
In a sweeping narrative spanning more than six centuries, Howard W. French does just that, for Born in Blackness vitally reframes the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the economic ascendancy of Europe, the anchoring of democracy in the West, and the fulfillment of so-called Enlightenment ideals all grew out of Europe’s dehumanizing engagement with the “dark” continent. In fact, French reveals, the first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not—as we are so often told, even today—Europe’s yearning for ties with Asia, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge a trade in gold with legendarily rich Black societies sequestered away in the heart of West Africa.
Creating a historical narrative that begins with the commencement of commercial relations between Portugal and Africa in the fifteenth century and ends with the onset of World War II, Born in Blackness interweaves precise historical detail with poignant, personal reportage. In so doing, it dramatically retrieves the lives of major African historical figures, from the unimaginably rich medieval emperors who traded with the Near East and beyond, to the Kongo sovereigns who heroically battled seventeenth-century European powers, to the ex-slaves who liberated Haitians from bondage and profoundly altered the course of American history.
While French cogently demonstrates the centrality of Africa to the rise of the modern world, Born in Blackness becomes, at the same time, a far more significant narrative, one that reveals a long-concealed history of trivialization and, more often, elision in depictions of African history throughout the last five hundred years. As French shows, the achievements of sovereign African nations and their now-far-flung peoples have time and again been etiolated and deliberately erased from modern history. As the West ascended, their stories—siloed and piecemeal—were swept into secluded corners, thus setting the stage for the hagiographic “rise of the West” theories that have endured to this day.
“Capacious and compelling” (Laurent Dubois), Born in Blackness is epic history on the grand scale. In the lofty tradition of bold, revisionist narratives, it reframes the story of gold and tobacco, sugar and cotton—and of the greatest “commodity” of them all, the twelve million people who were brought in chains from Africa to the “New World,” whose reclaimed lives shed a harsh light on our present world.
512 pages, Hardcover
First published October 12, 2021
About the author
Howard W. French
6 books158 followersHoward W. French is an associate professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he has taught both journalism and photography since 2008. For many years, he was a Senior Writer for The New York Times, where he spent most of a nearly 23 year career as a foreign correspondent, working in and traveling to over 100 countries on five continents.
From 1979 to 1986, he lived in West Africa, where he worked as a translator, taught English literature at the University of Ivory Coast, and lived as a freelance reporter.
Until July 2008, he was the chief of the newspaper’s Shanghai bureau. Prior to this assignment, he headed bureaus in Japan, West and Central Africa, Central America and the Caribbean. Mr. French’s work for the newspaper in both Africa and in China has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. He has won numerous other awards, including the Overseas Press Club award and the Grantham Prize. French speaks English, Chinese, Japanese, French, and Spanish.
From 1979 to 1986, he lived in West Africa, where he worked as a translator, taught English literature at the University of Ivory Coast, and lived as a freelance reporter.
Until July 2008, he was the chief of the newspaper’s Shanghai bureau. Prior to this assignment, he headed bureaus in Japan, West and Central Africa, Central America and the Caribbean. Mr. French’s work for the newspaper in both Africa and in China has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. He has won numerous other awards, including the Overseas Press Club award and the Grantham Prize. French speaks English, Chinese, Japanese, French, and Spanish.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 194 reviews
February 2, 2022
I like the argument of this book, but it is not well-written or well-edited. It is incredibly repetitive, jumbled, and suffered from a lack of driving narrative and analysis. It’s also not a work of history, as I don’t think it used any primary sources, but was instead a survey of historians’ works about the slave trade. This latter point wouldn’t have bothered me as much had the book been written in a manner that was more readable and less repetitive. It jumped around from focusing on one country’s slave trade to another, changing centuries and countries willy-nilly with no seeming rationale.
If I had a dime for every sentence that said something to the effect of, African slaves made Europe rich and made the modern world, the book would have more than paid for itself. Again, that’s fine if that’s your argument, but you should support it with a driven analysis and narrative rather than simply repeating the statement three times per chapter.
If I had a dime for every sentence that said something to the effect of, African slaves made Europe rich and made the modern world, the book would have more than paid for itself. Again, that’s fine if that’s your argument, but you should support it with a driven analysis and narrative rather than simply repeating the statement three times per chapter.
November 13, 2021
"Born in Blackness" is a history of Black people's contributions to modernity and the rise of the West. The beginning covers some of the same ground that Toby Green's "A Fistfull of Shells" did, but is focused less on currencies, and more on Africa's encounter with the Portuguese as a pivot point of modern history. The majority of the book focuses on the late 1400s through the 1600s, showing how trade in gold and slaves fueled European interest in Africa and resulted in the creation of a slave plantation system that was a cornerstone of European wealth and global inequities.
Focused on the transatlantic slave trade and the plantation system, French shows how important European colonies in the Caribbean (and Portugal's colony in Brazil) were to European wealth and power. The plantation system production of sugar started in São Tomé, and then moved to Brazil and the Caribbean, resulting in both an economic and caloric boost to Europeans, which in turn contributed to industrialization. The rise in sugar consumption also led to the proliferation of coffee ships in Europe, which contributed significantly to the birth of the modern public sphere. Brazil's sugar crop accounted for 40% of Portugal's total revenue in the late 1620s, generating more income than silver or gold production, and making Brazil more valuable than Portugal's Asian holdings which it deprioritized and allowed the Dutch to take over. France's Caribbean colonies, dominated by Saint Domingue (later Haiti), accounted for a third of France's trade and 15% of its economic growth during its 1716-1787 boom years.
The importance of these colonies was shown in the extent to which Europeans were willing to fight over them. For example, the Dutch fought the Portuguese and the Spanish for Brazil and Kongo/Angola as an oft-ignored part of the Thirty Years War. Similarly, England, which had held Barbados since the 1620s, sought to replace the Spanish in the West Indies under Cromwell's "Western Design." The Seven Years war, where traditional narratives focus on either the European or the North American theaters, had a significant Caribbean component, with Britain seeking to take over Caribbean colonies from both Spain and France. In fact, in 1762, Britain mobilized over 230 ships and 26,000 soldiers to take Cuba from Spain, losing more men than it did during the entire Seven Years War in North America. Tiny Guadeloupe was considered much more important then the much larger New France. And the Haitian revolution resulted in successive waves of French, Spanish, and British invasions trying to retake the territory, showing just how significant the Caribbean islands were to European power and wealth. This wealth likewise led to a stronger commercial sector and a comparative weakening of royal power, paving the way for Enlightenment reforms and democracy. Much of modern capitalism, development, and even democracy itself, was therefore built on the backs of Black people.
Interestingly, Europe did not build its plantation system in Africa, which is obviously much closer to Europe than the Americas. French persuasively argues that this shows that Africa as a continent was not significantly weaker than Europe, with African kingdoms being just as important to the slave trade and to African dynamics as the Europeans themselves. On the other hand, French argues, the scrambling for Africans to power European plantation systems did leave Africa weaker off as a continent - as well as comparatively less populous, and hence less urban and developed, than Europe - making Africa more vulnerable to outside competitors and the eventual scramble for Africa. For most of Africa's history, however, Europe was not as interested in African territory as it was in African people.
French's book is a tertiary work of history, summarizing and synthesizing the works of modern historians on Africa and Black people. But it is no less valuable for bringing together all of this history in one place. Persuasively arguing that the deemphasis of Black people in mainstream history constitutes an erasure of significant history, French's book goes a long way to showing just how pivotal the African continent and Black people in the Atlantic World have been to the making of the modern world. As Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson showed in a statistical study cited by the book, the differential in growth between Western Europe and other regions is almost entirely accounted for by the growth of nations with access to the Atlantic Ocean and Atlantic trade. Reading this book puts the history of divergent global economic trajectories into better context than any other book I've read.
Focused on the transatlantic slave trade and the plantation system, French shows how important European colonies in the Caribbean (and Portugal's colony in Brazil) were to European wealth and power. The plantation system production of sugar started in São Tomé, and then moved to Brazil and the Caribbean, resulting in both an economic and caloric boost to Europeans, which in turn contributed to industrialization. The rise in sugar consumption also led to the proliferation of coffee ships in Europe, which contributed significantly to the birth of the modern public sphere. Brazil's sugar crop accounted for 40% of Portugal's total revenue in the late 1620s, generating more income than silver or gold production, and making Brazil more valuable than Portugal's Asian holdings which it deprioritized and allowed the Dutch to take over. France's Caribbean colonies, dominated by Saint Domingue (later Haiti), accounted for a third of France's trade and 15% of its economic growth during its 1716-1787 boom years.
The importance of these colonies was shown in the extent to which Europeans were willing to fight over them. For example, the Dutch fought the Portuguese and the Spanish for Brazil and Kongo/Angola as an oft-ignored part of the Thirty Years War. Similarly, England, which had held Barbados since the 1620s, sought to replace the Spanish in the West Indies under Cromwell's "Western Design." The Seven Years war, where traditional narratives focus on either the European or the North American theaters, had a significant Caribbean component, with Britain seeking to take over Caribbean colonies from both Spain and France. In fact, in 1762, Britain mobilized over 230 ships and 26,000 soldiers to take Cuba from Spain, losing more men than it did during the entire Seven Years War in North America. Tiny Guadeloupe was considered much more important then the much larger New France. And the Haitian revolution resulted in successive waves of French, Spanish, and British invasions trying to retake the territory, showing just how significant the Caribbean islands were to European power and wealth. This wealth likewise led to a stronger commercial sector and a comparative weakening of royal power, paving the way for Enlightenment reforms and democracy. Much of modern capitalism, development, and even democracy itself, was therefore built on the backs of Black people.
Interestingly, Europe did not build its plantation system in Africa, which is obviously much closer to Europe than the Americas. French persuasively argues that this shows that Africa as a continent was not significantly weaker than Europe, with African kingdoms being just as important to the slave trade and to African dynamics as the Europeans themselves. On the other hand, French argues, the scrambling for Africans to power European plantation systems did leave Africa weaker off as a continent - as well as comparatively less populous, and hence less urban and developed, than Europe - making Africa more vulnerable to outside competitors and the eventual scramble for Africa. For most of Africa's history, however, Europe was not as interested in African territory as it was in African people.
French's book is a tertiary work of history, summarizing and synthesizing the works of modern historians on Africa and Black people. But it is no less valuable for bringing together all of this history in one place. Persuasively arguing that the deemphasis of Black people in mainstream history constitutes an erasure of significant history, French's book goes a long way to showing just how pivotal the African continent and Black people in the Atlantic World have been to the making of the modern world. As Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson showed in a statistical study cited by the book, the differential in growth between Western Europe and other regions is almost entirely accounted for by the growth of nations with access to the Atlantic Ocean and Atlantic trade. Reading this book puts the history of divergent global economic trajectories into better context than any other book I've read.
March 16, 2022
We’ve been taught that the modern world dawned when Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean in 1492 in search of a route to the riches of “India.” In fact, for centuries, historians have been telling us that everything changed because explorers from Spain and Portugal set out across the unknown reaches of the seas to establish new trade routes to what we know today as China, Indonesia, and India. Without question, the ensuing Columbian Exchange played a large role in setting off the Great Divergence between East and West. But in Born in Blackness, a compelling new revisionist history, Howard W. French persuasively offers an alternative explanation about the origin of the shift.
“The first impetus for the Age of Discovery,” he writes, “was not Europe’s yearning for ties with Asia, as so many of us have been taught in grade school, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge trading ties with legendarily rich Black societies hidden away somewhere in the heart of ‘darkest’ West Africa.”
THE LUST FOR GOLD IGNITED THE SLAVE TRADE
In the beginning, it was all about gold. Nearly 170 years before Columbus’ first voyage to the New World, the ruler of the fabulously wealthy Mali Empire set out eastward with a retinue of 60,000 men and women. Carrying as many as 18 tons of gold to distribute as gifts, Mansa Musa journeyed to the Middle East to prove he was the equal of the Islamic rulers of Egypt and the other Arab caliphates. Scholars in centuries to come have reckoned him the richest man in history. Word about Musa’s astonishing wealth eventually reached the nations of Europe, igniting their lust for gold.
“An abundance of modern scholarship,” French insists, “shows that more than any other cause or explanation it was the sensation stirred by news of Mansa Musa’s 1324 sojourn in Cairo and pilgrimage to Mecca, more than any of the more traditional theories, that set the creation of an Atlantic world into motion.” The agent of this change, in the 15th century, was Portugal. It was Portuguese ships sent down the west coast of Africa in search of gold that soon found a more lucrative endeavor in trading for slaves instead of the yellow metal. And the abundant wealth generated by four centuries of trade in African slaves built the empires of Portugal, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and England.
FIVE MAJOR TAKEAWAYS
The principal thesis of Born in Blackness is that the slave trade that flourished from about 1450 to 1850, not the “discovery” of the Americas, was the engine of change. It lifted Europe from poverty, financed the rise of global trade, and powered the Industrial Revolution. But French offers an abundance of other insights into the history of the past 500 years. Of the many to be found in the pages of this remarkable book, I’ll convey five that stand out.
THE SUGAR INDUSTRY DROVE EUROPE INTO THE MODERN ERA
Much is made of the role of cotton in sustaining the slave trade. But the cotton industry didn’t come into its own until the 19th century, driven by the unquenchable thirst for the fiber from the rapidly industrializing textile industry that mushroomed into existence in Britain. Two centuries earlier, sugar played a similar role. First on the Portuguese-owned island of São Tomé and later on the islands of the Caribbean and in Brazil, the Europeans (principally Portuguese, Dutch, English, and French) built slave plantations to grow sugar.
The profits were fabulous. And, as French notes, “the violently marshaled labor of Blacks led to much more lasting productive economic activity—with far more opportunities for what economists call virtuous feedback loops—than the mining that drove Spain’s acquisition of wealth from the New World ever would.” And those profits financed the establishment of colonies across the Atlantic and, later, the growth of industry in Western Europe that today we call the Industrial Revolution.
It’s difficult to grasp today just how large a role sugar—and the slaves who farmed it—played in the Atlantic economy. “By 1660 it is estimated that tiny Barbados’s sugar production alone was worth more than the combined exports of all of Spain’s New World colonies.” This included the prodigious output of silver from Spain’s silver mountain in Potosí, Bolivia, and its mines in northern Mexico. “And this was just for starters. From 1650 to 1800, as major new sugar islands came on line in the Caribbean, sugar consumption in Britain would increase 2500 percent, and over this time, the market value of sugar would consistently exceed the value of all other commodities combined.”
THE 13 COLONIES WERE MARGINAL TO THE BRITISH
“Specialists aside,” French writes, “few imagine that islands like Barbados and Jamaica were far more important in their day than were the English colonies that would become the United States.” The two islands produced substantially more wealth for Britain than all 13 colonies taken as whole. The riches that underwrote the expansion of the British Empire flowed not from North America but from the Caribbean—and it was wealth on a scale that few had dreamed possible. The North American colonies played only a peripheral role in this commerce—as merchants. The farmers, fishermen, and tradesmen centered on Boston, Philadelphia, and New York supplied food to the islands and clothed the slaves, themselves growing prosperous in the process.
From a broader perspective, the marginality of the North American colonies can be seen in the Europeans’ allocation of the slaves they captured in Africa. Forty-seven percent went to Brazil, and 42 percent to the islands of the Caribbean. Just 7 percent were sent to the 13 colonies. Take the island of Martinique, for example. As French reports, “Despite being less than one-fourth the size of Long Island, its sugar production drew more imports of slaves than the total volume of Africans trafficked to the United States throughout its history, including the colonial era.”
HAITI’S SLAVE REVOLUTION HELPED BUILD THE UNITED STATES
French recounts in sometimes numbing detail the history of slave revolts, making the case that resistance to enslavement among the African captives and their descendants was far more extensive than is generally understood. Over the years, although revolts were always successfully defeated, thousands of slaves did flee bondage. Throughout the New World, from Brazil to Mexico to the United States, these “maroons” formed independent, self-governing communities. But it wasn’t until the Haitian Revolution beginning in 1791 that a slave uprising succeeded. And that revolution shook the world.
In the 18th century, Haiti was the richest colony in history. And when its slave population successfully rebelled against the French and defeated huge armies sent by the French, British, and Spanish in the succeeding years, “Haiti rivaled the United States in terms of its influence on the world, notably in helping fulfill the most fundamental Enlightenment value of all, ending slavery.” And the impact on the size and shape of the United States was also profound.
For Napoleon Bonaparte, the deaths of thousands of troops in a futile effort to defeat the rebels and the loss of France’s most valuable colony were catastrophic. The loss forced Napoleon to abandon his hopes for empire on the North American mainland. When envoys from President Thomas Jefferson arrived in Paris to negotiate rights for US farmers and merchants to travel on the Mississippi, the French emperor astonished them by offering the entirety of Louisiana. The resulting $15 million Louisiana Purchase in 1803 nearly doubled the size of the United States.
THE DEMOGRAPHIC IMPACT OF THE SLAVE TRADE IN AFRICA WAS MASSIVE
“One sophisticated recent assessment of the continent’s demographics has suggested,” French writes, “that as a result of the slave trade of the modern era, by 1850, Africa’s population had been reduced to roughly half of what it would have been had there been no mass trafficking in humans.” An estimated 18.5 million Africans were trafficked—12.5 million to the New World and another 6 million to the Middle East or directly northward to Europe—but those numbers represent only a portion of the demographic damage.
“Establishing reliable numbers for the deaths that occurred during slaving-related warfare, capture, and especially the trek from the interior to the coast from slave-trading regions is probably an impossible task. Some historians have estimated, nonetheless, that as many Africans may have perished in these ways as survived the transatlantic passage.” And as a result, “some experts believe that . . . Africa’s population actually declined in absolute terms during the four centuries of the Atlantic trade.”
WHY MUCH OF AFRICA TODAY REMAINS UNDERDEVELOPED
The Scramble for Africa began following the Berlin Conference of 1884. At the time, “Europeans barely controlled 10 percent of the continent” despite five centuries of encroachment in search of gold and slaves. “By 1914 . . . Old Continent monarchs and other rulers held sway over 90 percent of Africa. The borders these European leaders agreed to among themselves remain the borders in force across most of the continent today.” And we see the results in the chronic African wars, coups, and dysfunctional governments even now in the 21st century.
The Scramble for Africa “left an enduringly debilitating legacy for the continent: a plethora of puny and scarcely functional states, with conflict among and between ethnic groups, and with some once coherent groups left pointlessly straddling borders and others with far less in common, just as illogically jumbled together in an artificial confection.” When observers of Africa debate the impact of colonialism, they often overlook this most obvious outcome of Europe’s disdain for the history, culture, and people of the continent.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
For many years Howard W. French (1957-) worked for the New York Times as a foreign correspondent, reporting from China and from West and Central Africa and serving as bureau chief for the Caribbean and Central America. Later, he covered Japan and Korea as Tokyo Bureau Chief. Since 2008, French has been a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is the author of four other books.
“The first impetus for the Age of Discovery,” he writes, “was not Europe’s yearning for ties with Asia, as so many of us have been taught in grade school, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge trading ties with legendarily rich Black societies hidden away somewhere in the heart of ‘darkest’ West Africa.”
THE LUST FOR GOLD IGNITED THE SLAVE TRADE
In the beginning, it was all about gold. Nearly 170 years before Columbus’ first voyage to the New World, the ruler of the fabulously wealthy Mali Empire set out eastward with a retinue of 60,000 men and women. Carrying as many as 18 tons of gold to distribute as gifts, Mansa Musa journeyed to the Middle East to prove he was the equal of the Islamic rulers of Egypt and the other Arab caliphates. Scholars in centuries to come have reckoned him the richest man in history. Word about Musa’s astonishing wealth eventually reached the nations of Europe, igniting their lust for gold.
“An abundance of modern scholarship,” French insists, “shows that more than any other cause or explanation it was the sensation stirred by news of Mansa Musa’s 1324 sojourn in Cairo and pilgrimage to Mecca, more than any of the more traditional theories, that set the creation of an Atlantic world into motion.” The agent of this change, in the 15th century, was Portugal. It was Portuguese ships sent down the west coast of Africa in search of gold that soon found a more lucrative endeavor in trading for slaves instead of the yellow metal. And the abundant wealth generated by four centuries of trade in African slaves built the empires of Portugal, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and England.
FIVE MAJOR TAKEAWAYS
The principal thesis of Born in Blackness is that the slave trade that flourished from about 1450 to 1850, not the “discovery” of the Americas, was the engine of change. It lifted Europe from poverty, financed the rise of global trade, and powered the Industrial Revolution. But French offers an abundance of other insights into the history of the past 500 years. Of the many to be found in the pages of this remarkable book, I’ll convey five that stand out.
THE SUGAR INDUSTRY DROVE EUROPE INTO THE MODERN ERA
Much is made of the role of cotton in sustaining the slave trade. But the cotton industry didn’t come into its own until the 19th century, driven by the unquenchable thirst for the fiber from the rapidly industrializing textile industry that mushroomed into existence in Britain. Two centuries earlier, sugar played a similar role. First on the Portuguese-owned island of São Tomé and later on the islands of the Caribbean and in Brazil, the Europeans (principally Portuguese, Dutch, English, and French) built slave plantations to grow sugar.
The profits were fabulous. And, as French notes, “the violently marshaled labor of Blacks led to much more lasting productive economic activity—with far more opportunities for what economists call virtuous feedback loops—than the mining that drove Spain’s acquisition of wealth from the New World ever would.” And those profits financed the establishment of colonies across the Atlantic and, later, the growth of industry in Western Europe that today we call the Industrial Revolution.
It’s difficult to grasp today just how large a role sugar—and the slaves who farmed it—played in the Atlantic economy. “By 1660 it is estimated that tiny Barbados’s sugar production alone was worth more than the combined exports of all of Spain’s New World colonies.” This included the prodigious output of silver from Spain’s silver mountain in Potosí, Bolivia, and its mines in northern Mexico. “And this was just for starters. From 1650 to 1800, as major new sugar islands came on line in the Caribbean, sugar consumption in Britain would increase 2500 percent, and over this time, the market value of sugar would consistently exceed the value of all other commodities combined.”
THE 13 COLONIES WERE MARGINAL TO THE BRITISH
“Specialists aside,” French writes, “few imagine that islands like Barbados and Jamaica were far more important in their day than were the English colonies that would become the United States.” The two islands produced substantially more wealth for Britain than all 13 colonies taken as whole. The riches that underwrote the expansion of the British Empire flowed not from North America but from the Caribbean—and it was wealth on a scale that few had dreamed possible. The North American colonies played only a peripheral role in this commerce—as merchants. The farmers, fishermen, and tradesmen centered on Boston, Philadelphia, and New York supplied food to the islands and clothed the slaves, themselves growing prosperous in the process.
From a broader perspective, the marginality of the North American colonies can be seen in the Europeans’ allocation of the slaves they captured in Africa. Forty-seven percent went to Brazil, and 42 percent to the islands of the Caribbean. Just 7 percent were sent to the 13 colonies. Take the island of Martinique, for example. As French reports, “Despite being less than one-fourth the size of Long Island, its sugar production drew more imports of slaves than the total volume of Africans trafficked to the United States throughout its history, including the colonial era.”
HAITI’S SLAVE REVOLUTION HELPED BUILD THE UNITED STATES
French recounts in sometimes numbing detail the history of slave revolts, making the case that resistance to enslavement among the African captives and their descendants was far more extensive than is generally understood. Over the years, although revolts were always successfully defeated, thousands of slaves did flee bondage. Throughout the New World, from Brazil to Mexico to the United States, these “maroons” formed independent, self-governing communities. But it wasn’t until the Haitian Revolution beginning in 1791 that a slave uprising succeeded. And that revolution shook the world.
In the 18th century, Haiti was the richest colony in history. And when its slave population successfully rebelled against the French and defeated huge armies sent by the French, British, and Spanish in the succeeding years, “Haiti rivaled the United States in terms of its influence on the world, notably in helping fulfill the most fundamental Enlightenment value of all, ending slavery.” And the impact on the size and shape of the United States was also profound.
For Napoleon Bonaparte, the deaths of thousands of troops in a futile effort to defeat the rebels and the loss of France’s most valuable colony were catastrophic. The loss forced Napoleon to abandon his hopes for empire on the North American mainland. When envoys from President Thomas Jefferson arrived in Paris to negotiate rights for US farmers and merchants to travel on the Mississippi, the French emperor astonished them by offering the entirety of Louisiana. The resulting $15 million Louisiana Purchase in 1803 nearly doubled the size of the United States.
THE DEMOGRAPHIC IMPACT OF THE SLAVE TRADE IN AFRICA WAS MASSIVE
“One sophisticated recent assessment of the continent’s demographics has suggested,” French writes, “that as a result of the slave trade of the modern era, by 1850, Africa’s population had been reduced to roughly half of what it would have been had there been no mass trafficking in humans.” An estimated 18.5 million Africans were trafficked—12.5 million to the New World and another 6 million to the Middle East or directly northward to Europe—but those numbers represent only a portion of the demographic damage.
“Establishing reliable numbers for the deaths that occurred during slaving-related warfare, capture, and especially the trek from the interior to the coast from slave-trading regions is probably an impossible task. Some historians have estimated, nonetheless, that as many Africans may have perished in these ways as survived the transatlantic passage.” And as a result, “some experts believe that . . . Africa’s population actually declined in absolute terms during the four centuries of the Atlantic trade.”
WHY MUCH OF AFRICA TODAY REMAINS UNDERDEVELOPED
The Scramble for Africa began following the Berlin Conference of 1884. At the time, “Europeans barely controlled 10 percent of the continent” despite five centuries of encroachment in search of gold and slaves. “By 1914 . . . Old Continent monarchs and other rulers held sway over 90 percent of Africa. The borders these European leaders agreed to among themselves remain the borders in force across most of the continent today.” And we see the results in the chronic African wars, coups, and dysfunctional governments even now in the 21st century.
The Scramble for Africa “left an enduringly debilitating legacy for the continent: a plethora of puny and scarcely functional states, with conflict among and between ethnic groups, and with some once coherent groups left pointlessly straddling borders and others with far less in common, just as illogically jumbled together in an artificial confection.” When observers of Africa debate the impact of colonialism, they often overlook this most obvious outcome of Europe’s disdain for the history, culture, and people of the continent.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
For many years Howard W. French (1957-) worked for the New York Times as a foreign correspondent, reporting from China and from West and Central Africa and serving as bureau chief for the Caribbean and Central America. Later, he covered Japan and Korea as Tokyo Bureau Chief. Since 2008, French has been a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is the author of four other books.
February 27, 2024
This book changed how I see west Africa.
Traditional accounts of the making of the modern world afford a place of primacy to European history. Some credit the fifteenth-century Age of Discovery and the maritime connection it established between West and East; others the accidental unearthing of the “New World.”
Still others point to the development of capitalism, the spread of Judeo-Christian beliefs; and so on, ad infinitum.
The history of Africa has mostly been hand-waived away. In a new perspective what if we put africa as the source of modernity?
In broad narrative of over six centuries, Howard W. French does just that, for Born in Blackness reframes the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the economic ascendancy of Europe, the anchoring of democracy in the West, and the fulfillment of so-called Enlightenment ideals all grew out of Europe’s dehumanizing engagement with the “dark” continent. Interestingly French reveals, the first stepoff for the Age of Discovery was not as I thought—Europe’s yearning for ties with Asia, but rather its centuries old desire trade in gold with legendarily rich Mali empire sequestered away in the heart of West Africa.
French demonstrates the centrality of Africa to the rise of the modern world, At the same time, a far more significant narrative reveals a long-concealed history of trivialization and, more often, elision in depictions of African history throughout the last five hundred years.
The book is complex, comes and goes, circles and get lost in numerous references and could be accused of getting off topic. But that’s a rabbit hole I’m happy to go down. It’s a compliment, not a criticism, that it left me more curious. It also spreads itself a little thin covering such a big time period and cherry picks-the areas the author feels most comfortable. A good introduction.
Traditional accounts of the making of the modern world afford a place of primacy to European history. Some credit the fifteenth-century Age of Discovery and the maritime connection it established between West and East; others the accidental unearthing of the “New World.”
Still others point to the development of capitalism, the spread of Judeo-Christian beliefs; and so on, ad infinitum.
The history of Africa has mostly been hand-waived away. In a new perspective what if we put africa as the source of modernity?
In broad narrative of over six centuries, Howard W. French does just that, for Born in Blackness reframes the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the economic ascendancy of Europe, the anchoring of democracy in the West, and the fulfillment of so-called Enlightenment ideals all grew out of Europe’s dehumanizing engagement with the “dark” continent. Interestingly French reveals, the first stepoff for the Age of Discovery was not as I thought—Europe’s yearning for ties with Asia, but rather its centuries old desire trade in gold with legendarily rich Mali empire sequestered away in the heart of West Africa.
French demonstrates the centrality of Africa to the rise of the modern world, At the same time, a far more significant narrative reveals a long-concealed history of trivialization and, more often, elision in depictions of African history throughout the last five hundred years.
The book is complex, comes and goes, circles and get lost in numerous references and could be accused of getting off topic. But that’s a rabbit hole I’m happy to go down. It’s a compliment, not a criticism, that it left me more curious. It also spreads itself a little thin covering such a big time period and cherry picks-the areas the author feels most comfortable. A good introduction.
September 7, 2023
Mit „Afrika und die Entstehung der modernen Welt“ vollzieht der langjährige Auslandskorrespondent der NY Times Howard W. French im Hinblick auf Afrika einen Perspektiv-Wechsel. Indem French plausibel aufzeigt, dass der ökonomische Aufstieg des Westens durch Sklavenarbeit auf Baumwoll- und Zuckerplantagen und deren ökonomischen Voräufern stark gestützt wurde, rückt er Afrika von der Peripherie in das Zentrum des Weltgeschehens. French ist außerdem erpicht darauf, die Historie Afrikas nicht als reine Opfergeschichte verstanden zu wissen. Denn an der Verschleppung von Sklaven waren lokale Herrscher oftmals nicht ganz unbeteiligt. Insgesamt ist dieses Buch stärker von dem Thema der Sklaverei geprägt, sodass der Kolionalismus oder eine allgemeine Darstellung in der Hintergrund rückt. Wer mit dieser Themensetzung konform geht sollte dieses Buch lesen!
Review auf Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cw4V39WNBnq
Review auf Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cw4V39WNBnq
February 18, 2022
All these words from the seller, but not one word from the sold. The Kings and Captains whose words moved ships. But not one word from the cargo.
-Zora Neale Huston, Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"Barracoon
Howard French, at least from the books of his I've read, has tackled ambitious topics China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa was reporting that outlined Chinese involvement in Africa, and Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power asserts a historical basis for Chinese irredentism and foreign policy.
Born in Blackness, then, asserts the importance of Africa in the Age of Discovery, and the emergence of the modern world. This starts with the grand hajj of Mansa Musa of the Malian Empire, whose lavish spending of gold became the talk of the entire Muslim World, and then, French asserts, to Europe, where stories of unimaginable wealth had spread. From there, European voyages of exploration, then trade, then rapine and plunder.
Part of the argument, strictly speaking - that pillage and slavery in one continent built the fortune of another - is not new. The additional step is in asserting the first voyages and gold trade were a staging group for the rest of the Age of Discovery, and that in turn made further expeditions possible. Portugal would first go to the Canaries, and then to Elmira, and from there, it could afford to go to Brazil and India. That part of the argument is not entirely new. French quotes the 18th century English satirist Daniel Defoe: "No African trade, no Negroes; no Negroes, no sugars, gingers, indicoes etc; no sugars, etc, no islands; no islands, no continent; no continent, no trade." And if there was not always gold, then sugar, cash crops, or wealth stolen from human bodies. Novelty, however, does not diminish French's moral certainty. He combines the synthesis of historical research with descriptions of the places now. Elmira, in modern Ghana, still has a local gold trade. The Valongo Wharf, in modern Rio, is now a pit in the ground.
But French writes to remind, and to prevent "diminishment, trivialization, and erasure." With this moral certitude comes relentless accumulation of the facts of dehumanization and terror.
-Zora Neale Huston, Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"Barracoon
Howard French, at least from the books of his I've read, has tackled ambitious topics China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa was reporting that outlined Chinese involvement in Africa, and Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power asserts a historical basis for Chinese irredentism and foreign policy.
Born in Blackness, then, asserts the importance of Africa in the Age of Discovery, and the emergence of the modern world. This starts with the grand hajj of Mansa Musa of the Malian Empire, whose lavish spending of gold became the talk of the entire Muslim World, and then, French asserts, to Europe, where stories of unimaginable wealth had spread. From there, European voyages of exploration, then trade, then rapine and plunder.
Part of the argument, strictly speaking - that pillage and slavery in one continent built the fortune of another - is not new. The additional step is in asserting the first voyages and gold trade were a staging group for the rest of the Age of Discovery, and that in turn made further expeditions possible. Portugal would first go to the Canaries, and then to Elmira, and from there, it could afford to go to Brazil and India. That part of the argument is not entirely new. French quotes the 18th century English satirist Daniel Defoe: "No African trade, no Negroes; no Negroes, no sugars, gingers, indicoes etc; no sugars, etc, no islands; no islands, no continent; no continent, no trade." And if there was not always gold, then sugar, cash crops, or wealth stolen from human bodies. Novelty, however, does not diminish French's moral certainty. He combines the synthesis of historical research with descriptions of the places now. Elmira, in modern Ghana, still has a local gold trade. The Valongo Wharf, in modern Rio, is now a pit in the ground.
But French writes to remind, and to prevent "diminishment, trivialization, and erasure." With this moral certitude comes relentless accumulation of the facts of dehumanization and terror.
Shelved as 'couldn-t-finish'
January 24, 2023Too repetitive to go on. I bought into the thesis before I even heard of this title. I don’t have the patience to wade through the detail and repeated insistence on the thesis. I respect the author’s perspective and passion, but life is short. I’ll wait for something on the topic by a historian working from primary sources.
May 29, 2022
This is an ambitious and important effort to describe the origins, history, and impact of the African slave trade on, in particular, the United States of America. I found the first part of the book on the origins and early history of African slavery to be disjointed and stilted, as no doubt the author was attempting to synthesize material from multiple sources. Style aside, he makes the point effectively, and repeatedly, about how slavery was critical to the growth of national and global economies over the past 600 or so years, which not incidentally were also 600 years of unimaginable pain and tragedy for millions of slaves and their families left behind. The second part of the book dealing more intimately with the history and impact of slavery in America flows much better, and leads to inevitable connections between chattel slavery and modern issues of civil rights and the moral authority of the USA. There, the author is speaking with the authority of family and personal experience, and he makes a strong case for redesigning school curricula to include a complete and transparent telling of the impact of slavery on American culture and politics, and what this implies for the future.
July 26, 2022
One of the great books that helps you think about the world in an entirely new way (whilst being horrified that you'd never learned these things before).
French points out that early European exploration and colonization were highly focused on trying to get access to sources of wealth from central Africa, first in the form of gold, which had always been a source for European specie (49-50), and later in the form of enslaved humans.
Cites sources that references to the Indies in the 1500s as destinations/objects of exploration usually referred to Africa and sometimes the myth of Prester John (61)., i.e., they demonstrate Spain's focus on controlling African trade in gold. When we read them as the beginning of the exploration/colonization of the Americas, we're reading backwards from what happened as though it was inevitable.
Points out that while people have argued that Western dominance in world affairs can be explained by superiority in weapons or other technology (not, Europeans were notably behind Arabs and Chinese in technology of all kinds), the philosophical superiority of Christianity (whatever that might mean), or (hopefully in the past), the inherent superiority of Europeans, there's no actual evidence for any of these arguments. Eric Williams, in a 1938 dissertation at Oxford, pretty convincingly demonstrates that, as French summarizes, "that plantation colonies, slave labor, the trade in slaves, [and] the sugar plantation-complex" were the real driving forces behind industrialization in Britain and the rise of the modern West (153-155). Points out that Europe's endless wars in the 1500s-1800s make most sense when understood as a fight for control of the "black gold" of slave bodies and control of the tropical territories where their stolen labor could be put to most productive use -- and that these wars "forged the most successful modern states" (159).
Points out that sugar plantations, which often required the labor of 2,000 people, were by far the largest businesses in the late 1500s - factories in England wouldn't approach that size until at least the 1800s (179). Shockingly, I had never thought before about how very specific the slave trade was -- that there could be a single plaza in Brazil where 900,000 slaves disembarked (Brazil being the destination of about 40% of all slaves kidnapped from Africa) (179).
By the late 1600s the sugar trade was a driver of the economy in England (197). Probably more accurate to see the sugar mills, rather than the put-out textile system in England, as the place where farm and factory first met, capitalist forms of corporations and investment by disparate people unknown to one another, and coordination of highly synchronized activities first took place (206).
Argues that the cotton textile mills of New England were driven largely by demand for cotton from slave plantations in the Caribbean (212). He cites Kenneth Pomeranz's The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy, which argues that the West's rise was fuelled by rapid colonization/appropriation of agricultural capacity in the Americas, and the expropriation of African labor. He argues that this was turbocharged by using the agricultural land to grow sugar that fuelled the workers in England (213). Another argued that in 1800, sugar accounted for 2% of English calories; by 1900, it was 14%, far higher than any other country (214). Even in terms of textiles, replacing the cotton from plantations with hemp, flax, or wool would have required exponentially more land and labor than cotton (216).
Points out that the slave trade created shatter zones and more slave trading within Africa, as depleted populations tried to replace lost labor through slaves or incorporating others through kinship (326).
Little discussed aspect of American history is that most of the labor in the Louisiana Purchase (the labor that rendered that land economically valuable and productive) was performed by slaves. Also, that Jefferson saw the purchase as an escape valve for sending recently-revolting slaves from the east coast to the Mississippi Valley - over a million were so "sold down the river" 1820-1860 (335). All this fulfilled the need for additonal labor for cotton, especially after France's loss of Haiti.
Many slave revolts were incited by the importation of Blacks from St. Domingue who knew that it was possible to overthrow a slaveholding government (337).
"We are talking here about a migration -- or, more accurately, a mass deportation -- that ensnared more Black poeple than the number of whites who undertook the wagon train settlement of the American West, bigger than the emigration of Jews from eastern Europe in the late 1800s (388).
Quotes DuBois: Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, Black labor "became the foundation stone not only of the Southern social structure, but of Northern manufacture and commerce, of the English factory system, of European commerce, of buying and selling on a worldwide scale" (394).
"I believe that the sooner denial about the large and foundational role that slavery played in creating American power and prosperity is put to definitive rest, the better Americans as a people will come to understand both themselves and their country's true place in American history." (394)
The rise of cotton in the US was partly caused by the fall of tobacco prices (397), partly by the availability of the Louisiana purchase (due to Napoleon's need to divert the military to fight the Haitian revolution), to some extent perhaps the cotton gin, and to surging imports (until 1807) and internal forced removal (after that) of slaves, as well as the 400% increase in slave productivity through "a systematic increase in violent methods of supervision and punishment, combined with ever more far-reaching record-keeping" (397).
France's occupation of North America only made sense as a back office for the lucrative sugar trade (though I suspect here he may mean Louisiana, as the fur trade in the pays d'en haut was pretty lucrative in itself). "Resolute in their desire for freedom, the Haitians were equally instrumental in placing America on the path to great powerhood in the nineteenth century. More than any other single event that has happened in the country's entire history, in fact, Saint Domingue's self-liberating slaves formed and shaped the continent-size America we know on the map today" (400).
Points out authors who have argued that history was not set in stone - if Jefferson professed to hate slavery and to fear rebellions in Virginia, rather than underwrite the sale of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of slaves down the river, he could have used the money from the sale of lands in Louisiana to buy their freedom, or opened the land to settlement by them - French argues that pro-slavery sentiment was not then so strong as to preclude this (404). There is so much we forget - one reason the British were able to burn Washington is that the American militia fled based on unfounded rumors of a slave revolt (405).
French points out that early European exploration and colonization were highly focused on trying to get access to sources of wealth from central Africa, first in the form of gold, which had always been a source for European specie (49-50), and later in the form of enslaved humans.
Cites sources that references to the Indies in the 1500s as destinations/objects of exploration usually referred to Africa and sometimes the myth of Prester John (61)., i.e., they demonstrate Spain's focus on controlling African trade in gold. When we read them as the beginning of the exploration/colonization of the Americas, we're reading backwards from what happened as though it was inevitable.
Points out that while people have argued that Western dominance in world affairs can be explained by superiority in weapons or other technology (not, Europeans were notably behind Arabs and Chinese in technology of all kinds), the philosophical superiority of Christianity (whatever that might mean), or (hopefully in the past), the inherent superiority of Europeans, there's no actual evidence for any of these arguments. Eric Williams, in a 1938 dissertation at Oxford, pretty convincingly demonstrates that, as French summarizes, "that plantation colonies, slave labor, the trade in slaves, [and] the sugar plantation-complex" were the real driving forces behind industrialization in Britain and the rise of the modern West (153-155). Points out that Europe's endless wars in the 1500s-1800s make most sense when understood as a fight for control of the "black gold" of slave bodies and control of the tropical territories where their stolen labor could be put to most productive use -- and that these wars "forged the most successful modern states" (159).
Points out that sugar plantations, which often required the labor of 2,000 people, were by far the largest businesses in the late 1500s - factories in England wouldn't approach that size until at least the 1800s (179). Shockingly, I had never thought before about how very specific the slave trade was -- that there could be a single plaza in Brazil where 900,000 slaves disembarked (Brazil being the destination of about 40% of all slaves kidnapped from Africa) (179).
By the late 1600s the sugar trade was a driver of the economy in England (197). Probably more accurate to see the sugar mills, rather than the put-out textile system in England, as the place where farm and factory first met, capitalist forms of corporations and investment by disparate people unknown to one another, and coordination of highly synchronized activities first took place (206).
Argues that the cotton textile mills of New England were driven largely by demand for cotton from slave plantations in the Caribbean (212). He cites Kenneth Pomeranz's The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy, which argues that the West's rise was fuelled by rapid colonization/appropriation of agricultural capacity in the Americas, and the expropriation of African labor. He argues that this was turbocharged by using the agricultural land to grow sugar that fuelled the workers in England (213). Another argued that in 1800, sugar accounted for 2% of English calories; by 1900, it was 14%, far higher than any other country (214). Even in terms of textiles, replacing the cotton from plantations with hemp, flax, or wool would have required exponentially more land and labor than cotton (216).
Points out that the slave trade created shatter zones and more slave trading within Africa, as depleted populations tried to replace lost labor through slaves or incorporating others through kinship (326).
Little discussed aspect of American history is that most of the labor in the Louisiana Purchase (the labor that rendered that land economically valuable and productive) was performed by slaves. Also, that Jefferson saw the purchase as an escape valve for sending recently-revolting slaves from the east coast to the Mississippi Valley - over a million were so "sold down the river" 1820-1860 (335). All this fulfilled the need for additonal labor for cotton, especially after France's loss of Haiti.
Many slave revolts were incited by the importation of Blacks from St. Domingue who knew that it was possible to overthrow a slaveholding government (337).
"We are talking here about a migration -- or, more accurately, a mass deportation -- that ensnared more Black poeple than the number of whites who undertook the wagon train settlement of the American West, bigger than the emigration of Jews from eastern Europe in the late 1800s (388).
Quotes DuBois: Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, Black labor "became the foundation stone not only of the Southern social structure, but of Northern manufacture and commerce, of the English factory system, of European commerce, of buying and selling on a worldwide scale" (394).
"I believe that the sooner denial about the large and foundational role that slavery played in creating American power and prosperity is put to definitive rest, the better Americans as a people will come to understand both themselves and their country's true place in American history." (394)
The rise of cotton in the US was partly caused by the fall of tobacco prices (397), partly by the availability of the Louisiana purchase (due to Napoleon's need to divert the military to fight the Haitian revolution), to some extent perhaps the cotton gin, and to surging imports (until 1807) and internal forced removal (after that) of slaves, as well as the 400% increase in slave productivity through "a systematic increase in violent methods of supervision and punishment, combined with ever more far-reaching record-keeping" (397).
France's occupation of North America only made sense as a back office for the lucrative sugar trade (though I suspect here he may mean Louisiana, as the fur trade in the pays d'en haut was pretty lucrative in itself). "Resolute in their desire for freedom, the Haitians were equally instrumental in placing America on the path to great powerhood in the nineteenth century. More than any other single event that has happened in the country's entire history, in fact, Saint Domingue's self-liberating slaves formed and shaped the continent-size America we know on the map today" (400).
Points out authors who have argued that history was not set in stone - if Jefferson professed to hate slavery and to fear rebellions in Virginia, rather than underwrite the sale of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of slaves down the river, he could have used the money from the sale of lands in Louisiana to buy their freedom, or opened the land to settlement by them - French argues that pro-slavery sentiment was not then so strong as to preclude this (404). There is so much we forget - one reason the British were able to burn Washington is that the American militia fled based on unfounded rumors of a slave revolt (405).
May 12, 2023
Essential reading for anyone interested in a different perspective.
February 8, 2022
Disappointed
I had very high hopes for the book. I have read several articles about the book in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. The subject attracts me. Recently read a Brazilian book with the same approach but much much much better (Laurindo Gomes). The book is complex, comes and goes, circles and get lost in numerous references like a thesis. I was looking for a good book and spent money in a thesis.
I had very high hopes for the book. I have read several articles about the book in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. The subject attracts me. Recently read a Brazilian book with the same approach but much much much better (Laurindo Gomes). The book is complex, comes and goes, circles and get lost in numerous references like a thesis. I was looking for a good book and spent money in a thesis.
July 14, 2022
This is a history book not written by a historian and it suffers for that. It has an intriguing premise that Africa is much more important in the development of the modern world than has been presupposed. However, he does not demonstrate thesis. Instead of a concise driving narrative, we get a series of stories that are loosely associated with the theme but not entirely substantiated. I have to say that I gave up on the book after several chapters
October 14, 2023
Howard W. Frenchs Werk hält, was der Titel verspricht. Er zeigt auf, wie Afrika zur Entstehung der Modernen Welt beigetragen hat. Die Zusammenhänge, die er aufzeigt, sind teilweise so naheliegend, dass man geschockt ist, sie nicht früher erkannt zu haben. Doch genau darin liegt der ungeheure Wert dieses Buches. Es macht deutlich, wie untervertreten eine "afrikanische" Perspektive auf die Globalgeschichte ist. Wer für den Wälzer keine Zeit hat, kann sich hier eine solide Zusammenfassung des Autoren ansehen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBJdD...
January 7, 2022
Excellent book looking at the history of Africa and the African diaspora. I learned a lot and was very glad to read this book. It covers most of African history and the African diaspora.
November 22, 2021
For most historians, the "Age of Discovery" is an epoch when men in ships sailed forth from Europe to find new ways to Asia, whether around the continent of Africa to the immediate south or across the long, dangerous Atlantic Ocean. It was an era in which new worlds were encountered, but the African mainland merely viewed as a hindrance to explorers who had to get around it. The continent of Africa, according to these historians, played no role in the Age of Discovery.
Howard W. French, author of "Born In Blackness," would beg to differ. In this masterful work, he argues that, far from being a minor player on the world stage, Africa was indeed the motor for modernity and economic wealth (albeit for Europe and the Americas, with Africa and its many ethnic groups never seeing or realizing the benefits of their own labor). Africa was pivotal to shaping how our world works today, from as early as the voyages of Columbus to the independence movements that liberated the continent from European domination in the Fifties and Sixties.
The narrative stretches back to the 1400's, when explorers sponsored by Prince Henry "The Navigator" of Portugal began to seek gold on the African continent. Far from being interested only in the riches of Asia, French argues that the Portuguese and other European powers saw Africa as the land where they would find their fortunes. This desire for power began with gold and treasure but ultimately and tragically turned into a lust for African bodies to work the plantations that first cropped up on islands close to the African mainland before going across the ocean and into the Americas. As French notes, virtually every innovation or step towards modernity undertaken first in Europe and then in the Americas was helped along by the existence and perpetuation of slavery.
It is a hard thing to grasp for many Americans, how central slavery was to our history. But in this epic retelling of centuries of conquest, exploitation, degradation, and abuse, Howard W. French has helped give us a better sense of the real history that we might care to ignore (because there is precious little room for the myths that many of us still choose to believe in, though we should know better). "Born In Blackness" is an essential read, because it doesn't sugarcoat what actually happened in our collective history. Indeed, it brings to light many aspects that might otherwise have remained just out of sight.
Howard W. French, author of "Born In Blackness," would beg to differ. In this masterful work, he argues that, far from being a minor player on the world stage, Africa was indeed the motor for modernity and economic wealth (albeit for Europe and the Americas, with Africa and its many ethnic groups never seeing or realizing the benefits of their own labor). Africa was pivotal to shaping how our world works today, from as early as the voyages of Columbus to the independence movements that liberated the continent from European domination in the Fifties and Sixties.
The narrative stretches back to the 1400's, when explorers sponsored by Prince Henry "The Navigator" of Portugal began to seek gold on the African continent. Far from being interested only in the riches of Asia, French argues that the Portuguese and other European powers saw Africa as the land where they would find their fortunes. This desire for power began with gold and treasure but ultimately and tragically turned into a lust for African bodies to work the plantations that first cropped up on islands close to the African mainland before going across the ocean and into the Americas. As French notes, virtually every innovation or step towards modernity undertaken first in Europe and then in the Americas was helped along by the existence and perpetuation of slavery.
It is a hard thing to grasp for many Americans, how central slavery was to our history. But in this epic retelling of centuries of conquest, exploitation, degradation, and abuse, Howard W. French has helped give us a better sense of the real history that we might care to ignore (because there is precious little room for the myths that many of us still choose to believe in, though we should know better). "Born In Blackness" is an essential read, because it doesn't sugarcoat what actually happened in our collective history. Indeed, it brings to light many aspects that might otherwise have remained just out of sight.
June 21, 2022
When I considered the subtitle of this book, my first thought was, well, that's rather ambitious. Did the work live up to expectation? Pretty much. To a large degree this is just a popularization of the concept of there being an "Atlantic World" that has come to dominate much of academic history since the 1990s. What you get, as a reader, is about 50% history, 30% reportage and memoir, and 20% polemic. The issue is that this composition makes for something of a roundabout reading experience. However, I do think that French is quite justified in pushing a hard line that, as the Columbian Age fades away, it was built on the backs of African folks, and many people would desperately like to avoid that issue. Besides that the real guts of this work is built on the experience of Western empire-building ca. 1500-1700, particularly from the perspective of the Portuguese.
January 4, 2022
At a time when Americans question the existence of institutional racism and the pressing need for a reckoning with the county’s slave-owning past, this outstanding work of scholarship arrives in book stores. It is impossible for me to imagine being able to read the book and not come away with a sense of the historical injustice done to Africa and the descendants of millions of human beings torn from their homes, and their lives destroyed.
The sad reality is those who need to read the book will not (I speak from experience of ordering a copy for an acquaintance who returned the book unread…..calling it Black Lives Matter propaganda). Please read this book and then redouble your efforts to fight for a racially just world.
The sad reality is those who need to read the book will not (I speak from experience of ordering a copy for an acquaintance who returned the book unread…..calling it Black Lives Matter propaganda). Please read this book and then redouble your efforts to fight for a racially just world.
October 12, 2022
I really enjoyed the first half of this book but I found the second half not as interesting. It seemed like it was going to cover a larger span of time more in depths from the subtitle. I certainly learned a lot of interesting details but not sure there were a ton of surprises.
March 13, 2023
“Born in Blackness” by Howard W. French is a tremendously rich and detailed accounting of the foundational role that Africa and African people served in the making of the Atlantic—“modern”—world. French traces almost 1000 years of history, beginning with the Sahelian, gold-bearing empire of Mali of the early middle ages, and ending with references to the mid-20th Century USA. As the last sentence of the book states, this analysis is intended to end “the invisibility of Africa in the construction of what we all know and experience as the modern…” In carrying this intention forward, French provides an absolute treasure-trove of knowledge on the history of various African nations, European nations, and the colonial societies of the Western Hemisphere.
There are so many fascinating aspects of this book. The early section on the Mali Empire and Mansa Musa’s influence on modernity is striking. French notes that while Musa is often celebrated as being the “richest man in history,” his famous pilgrimage to Cairo and Mecca actually had severe long-term consequences on Mali’s statecraft, as well as West Africans more generally. Among other things, it exposed to the world (particularly, the southern Europeans of Portugal and Spain) that West Africa was a land of presumably inexhaustible gold and Black slaves. In making this point, French connected the dots between Mansa Musa and Europe’s original intentions with its “Age of Discovery”—centering the search for African gold and other mineral wealth as the focus, rather than some nebulous attempt to circumvent the continent to find a route to Asia.
This book excels at giving the right amount of attention to each region discussed—from Portugal’s original mining and slaving activities at Elmina and Sao Tome, to its descent down the West African coast to Angola and Congo, all the way across the Atlantic to Brazil. Further, French masterfully demonstrates the “Pan European” nature of the creation of the Atlantic world via the plundering of Africa and African people, featuring the Dutch, Spanish, British, and French activities in the Caribbean, North America, and Africa. The book also spent a considerable amount of time detailing African rebellions and their ultimate impacts on modern world-making.
This book does a great job attempting to put Europe’s “dominance” of Africa and African people in perspective. It wasn’t nearly as one-sided as we often assume, if at all, at least originally. French answers the question of why—if Europeans were so powerful—they chose to take their African captives all the way across the Atlantic, instead of enslaving them on the fertile lands of West-Central Africa. French asserts that African agency in the form of powerful inland empires and states prevented this type of domination (as did Europe’s inability to deal with tropical diseases). However, in telling the story of African national autonomy, French did not shy away from the uncomfortable discussion of African complicity in the slave trade. While noting the very apparent differences between traditional African slavery and Europe’s eventual system of chattel, hereditary, race-based enslavement, French did make clear that various African nations were instrumental in facilitating the mass displacement and enslavement of African people. However, French handled this discussion with great care and nuance, indicating the lack of existence of a unified “African identify” in the highly fragmented societies of West-Central Africa, and noting the intricate, myriad of interests that African elites had in selling other Africans to Europeans.
To sum it up, “Born in Blackness” excels in demonstrating the centrality of African people—specifically in their enslaved status—in the development of the “modern” age.
There are so many fascinating aspects of this book. The early section on the Mali Empire and Mansa Musa’s influence on modernity is striking. French notes that while Musa is often celebrated as being the “richest man in history,” his famous pilgrimage to Cairo and Mecca actually had severe long-term consequences on Mali’s statecraft, as well as West Africans more generally. Among other things, it exposed to the world (particularly, the southern Europeans of Portugal and Spain) that West Africa was a land of presumably inexhaustible gold and Black slaves. In making this point, French connected the dots between Mansa Musa and Europe’s original intentions with its “Age of Discovery”—centering the search for African gold and other mineral wealth as the focus, rather than some nebulous attempt to circumvent the continent to find a route to Asia.
This book excels at giving the right amount of attention to each region discussed—from Portugal’s original mining and slaving activities at Elmina and Sao Tome, to its descent down the West African coast to Angola and Congo, all the way across the Atlantic to Brazil. Further, French masterfully demonstrates the “Pan European” nature of the creation of the Atlantic world via the plundering of Africa and African people, featuring the Dutch, Spanish, British, and French activities in the Caribbean, North America, and Africa. The book also spent a considerable amount of time detailing African rebellions and their ultimate impacts on modern world-making.
This book does a great job attempting to put Europe’s “dominance” of Africa and African people in perspective. It wasn’t nearly as one-sided as we often assume, if at all, at least originally. French answers the question of why—if Europeans were so powerful—they chose to take their African captives all the way across the Atlantic, instead of enslaving them on the fertile lands of West-Central Africa. French asserts that African agency in the form of powerful inland empires and states prevented this type of domination (as did Europe’s inability to deal with tropical diseases). However, in telling the story of African national autonomy, French did not shy away from the uncomfortable discussion of African complicity in the slave trade. While noting the very apparent differences between traditional African slavery and Europe’s eventual system of chattel, hereditary, race-based enslavement, French did make clear that various African nations were instrumental in facilitating the mass displacement and enslavement of African people. However, French handled this discussion with great care and nuance, indicating the lack of existence of a unified “African identify” in the highly fragmented societies of West-Central Africa, and noting the intricate, myriad of interests that African elites had in selling other Africans to Europeans.
To sum it up, “Born in Blackness” excels in demonstrating the centrality of African people—specifically in their enslaved status—in the development of the “modern” age.
November 25, 2021
This is a really important reframing and re-entering history. Howard French painstakingly traces the elements of modernity to their African roots. I felt like I was behind, late to the game, in learning a lot of the history in this book. I have a hard time sticking with non-fiction, but the writing as well as the revelatory events detailed kept me really engaged and determined, even when it was hard, and heartbreaking or stomach turning to read. There were a couple of sections that I balked at, they felt a little harmful or reinforced a sort of resignation about slavery and the challenges that West Africa faced at the beginning of chattel slavery and early contact with the colonizers. (Spoiler: there are "cannibals" and I found it sus.) French is a really brilliant and engaging writer. I'm so thankful for all that I learned. It definitely brought me out of a lot of ignorance that I should not have had as an anti-racist trainer and former graduate student of Atlantic history, but it made me better understand the inherent racism in how these histories are ignored and suppressed. I really appreciated the personal anecdotes and family history that French included, as well as the sly (& deliciously petty) use of historically factual information about modern day folks who continue to float on the profit of slavery. The book was sobering, upsetting, enlightening, gutting and deeply educational. I feel spurred to get back into my grad school history books. French really shifted the frame for me on the history of modernity and industrialization. I want more world history to acknowledge and center the role of Africa and Africans in the creation of everything that US power and wealth is built upon. One could paraphrase a beloved New Orleans based artist for the summary of French's argument, "Everything you love about 'the modern world' is because of Black people."
December 4, 2022
Some books are so good that it’s hard to envision a review that does them justice. Such is the case with Born in Blackness by Howard French.
The main message of Born in Blackness is straightforward. The roots of our common modernity lie in the cruelty and barbarism of slavery, of a vicious, racist forced labor. The wealth, structure and ease of modern capitalism and our democratic institutions lie squarely on the foundation of enslaved humans, without which the world we know would not be possible.
Perhaps the most important contribution this book makes is that it takes as it’s focus the countries on both sides of the Atlantic whose wealth and power derived from the millions of enslaved Africans forced to work the millions of acres stolen from Native Americans. French examines slavery and its impact in the cultures, economies, political structures and military exploits of the kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, Songhai, Kongo, the Asante, Kongo and Ndongo of Africa, and in those European countries that aimed for empires, including Portugal, the Netherlands, Spain, England, and France. He also examines the evolution and impact of slavery on places in the New World, such as Brazil, the Caribbean , and the United States. The breath and depth of this work is astonishing, especially considering the author also, with seeming ease, weaves in multiple theories about each significant phase of the Atlantic slave trade and its economic and cultural effects. This Pan-Atlantic perspective is investigated in detail over the span of 600 years.
What is surprising, or even shocking, is the extent to which Western academic history has denied this fundamental fact, and the degree to which our ancestors’ reliance on enslaved humans is written out of history. Time and again, French recounts trips to the places he covers in the book, from countries and villages in West Africa to Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States, and more often than not he is unable to find evidence - in the form of statues, monuments, plaques, historical markers - of the horrors of the slave trade. When he does find a historical marker bearing witness to EuroAmerican barbarism, too often it is all but hidden or woefully inadequate. The foundation of modernity, the slaves used to work the lands of the New World, is virtually erased, leaving only the myths of White technological progress and White superiority as explanations for the comforts and wealth of the Western world.
The historical silencing of Black agency and the fundamental fact of slavery as the means by which White Europeans built their empires and launched the Industrial Revolution is ongoing and continuously shocking. Two years into the slave revolt that would ultimately free Haiti, the British sent the largest force it has ever launched at the time to put down the rebellion and take over the French plantation colony. In 1798, with 3/5ths of their 20,000 soldiers dead, the British withdrew. As French says, “And yet the Black colony’s name [Haiti] has never appeared on a regimental banner in remembrance of a major campaign or sacrifice, marking yet another historical silencing in this symphony of erasure.”
“American traditions of historiography,” writes French, “are not alone in their tendency to mutely glide past details that run…contrary to convenient myths.” Such is the case with slavery being the real driver of EuroAmerican success, but, ironically, the successful slave revolt in Haiti also uniquely shaped the course of American history. “More than any other single event that has happened in the country’s entire history,” Haiti’s “self-liberating slaves formed and shaped the continent size America we know on the map today.” Napoleon saw the writing on the wall with the death of his general and two key players switching sides against him in Haiti (at the time named Saint Dominigue) together with a new outbreak of war with England. His dreams of empire in the New World shattered, Napoleon recalibrated and stunned Thomas Jefferson’s representatives in Paris by offering the Louisiana Territory for the windfall price of $15M. By cutting his losses, Napoleon was free to pursue empire in Europe, making America as we know it possible.
Born in Blackness is a brilliant, compelling synthesis of the author’s own unique contributions to this history together with the equally important work of other scholars, past and present. French generously gives each of these scholars their due, contextualizing their work in terms current academic thought and where the field might be heading. Throughout, he also sprinkles anecdotes from some of the 120 countries he’s visited, many of these trips undertaken in the hope of finding traces of the past inscribed on or concealed under today’s world.
Ideally, this book, or one like it, should be required reading for every high school student before graduation. There’s little chance of that happening given the stranglehold that conservative Whites, the intellectual descendants of plantation owners and slave traders, have on the textbook market. So instead, read this book and hold on to the hope that the moral arc of the universe will continue bending away from those who want to erase history for their own benefit.
The main message of Born in Blackness is straightforward. The roots of our common modernity lie in the cruelty and barbarism of slavery, of a vicious, racist forced labor. The wealth, structure and ease of modern capitalism and our democratic institutions lie squarely on the foundation of enslaved humans, without which the world we know would not be possible.
Perhaps the most important contribution this book makes is that it takes as it’s focus the countries on both sides of the Atlantic whose wealth and power derived from the millions of enslaved Africans forced to work the millions of acres stolen from Native Americans. French examines slavery and its impact in the cultures, economies, political structures and military exploits of the kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, Songhai, Kongo, the Asante, Kongo and Ndongo of Africa, and in those European countries that aimed for empires, including Portugal, the Netherlands, Spain, England, and France. He also examines the evolution and impact of slavery on places in the New World, such as Brazil, the Caribbean , and the United States. The breath and depth of this work is astonishing, especially considering the author also, with seeming ease, weaves in multiple theories about each significant phase of the Atlantic slave trade and its economic and cultural effects. This Pan-Atlantic perspective is investigated in detail over the span of 600 years.
What is surprising, or even shocking, is the extent to which Western academic history has denied this fundamental fact, and the degree to which our ancestors’ reliance on enslaved humans is written out of history. Time and again, French recounts trips to the places he covers in the book, from countries and villages in West Africa to Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States, and more often than not he is unable to find evidence - in the form of statues, monuments, plaques, historical markers - of the horrors of the slave trade. When he does find a historical marker bearing witness to EuroAmerican barbarism, too often it is all but hidden or woefully inadequate. The foundation of modernity, the slaves used to work the lands of the New World, is virtually erased, leaving only the myths of White technological progress and White superiority as explanations for the comforts and wealth of the Western world.
The historical silencing of Black agency and the fundamental fact of slavery as the means by which White Europeans built their empires and launched the Industrial Revolution is ongoing and continuously shocking. Two years into the slave revolt that would ultimately free Haiti, the British sent the largest force it has ever launched at the time to put down the rebellion and take over the French plantation colony. In 1798, with 3/5ths of their 20,000 soldiers dead, the British withdrew. As French says, “And yet the Black colony’s name [Haiti] has never appeared on a regimental banner in remembrance of a major campaign or sacrifice, marking yet another historical silencing in this symphony of erasure.”
“American traditions of historiography,” writes French, “are not alone in their tendency to mutely glide past details that run…contrary to convenient myths.” Such is the case with slavery being the real driver of EuroAmerican success, but, ironically, the successful slave revolt in Haiti also uniquely shaped the course of American history. “More than any other single event that has happened in the country’s entire history,” Haiti’s “self-liberating slaves formed and shaped the continent size America we know on the map today.” Napoleon saw the writing on the wall with the death of his general and two key players switching sides against him in Haiti (at the time named Saint Dominigue) together with a new outbreak of war with England. His dreams of empire in the New World shattered, Napoleon recalibrated and stunned Thomas Jefferson’s representatives in Paris by offering the Louisiana Territory for the windfall price of $15M. By cutting his losses, Napoleon was free to pursue empire in Europe, making America as we know it possible.
Born in Blackness is a brilliant, compelling synthesis of the author’s own unique contributions to this history together with the equally important work of other scholars, past and present. French generously gives each of these scholars their due, contextualizing their work in terms current academic thought and where the field might be heading. Throughout, he also sprinkles anecdotes from some of the 120 countries he’s visited, many of these trips undertaken in the hope of finding traces of the past inscribed on or concealed under today’s world.
Ideally, this book, or one like it, should be required reading for every high school student before graduation. There’s little chance of that happening given the stranglehold that conservative Whites, the intellectual descendants of plantation owners and slave traders, have on the textbook market. So instead, read this book and hold on to the hope that the moral arc of the universe will continue bending away from those who want to erase history for their own benefit.
February 6, 2023
addresses oversight in teaching of history of European involvement in Africa
May 19, 2022
i haven't finished 'how europe underdeveloped africa,' but will say french's 'born in blackness' is more matter-of-fact and revelatory than radical in nature. it was a good compliment after reading graeber's 'the dawn of everything' earlier this year, as french offers his re-framing of modernity, what territories in africa were doing before euopean invasion, and middle-eastern, for that matter; that gives credit to african labor, both forced and unforced. though, that might be one gripe with the book, and most likely it is due to the lack of archive, whether intentional, circumstantial, destroyed, or simply yet to be found; there are far fewer journals and labor narratives than preserved documentation from the likes of kingdoms. the wealth around western africa was extraordinary, their kingdoms' rulers obscenely wealthy, with hundreds to thousands of servants and slaves per ruling member, carrying unfathomable amounts of gold dust during excursions and trips, for discovery or more often trade. when portugal arrived, and succeeded in trade (prior to violent invasion), some territories found it beneficial to convert to christianity/catholicism because, coincidentally, much of the religious mythology was the same, and symbolism, like the cross; it was also due to this kingdoms started forming lines of royal succession, like those in europe, becoming less democratic selecting rulers. spain caught wind of the riches portugal brought over, and matters grew worse, the european "competition" for africa had begun, the catholic church stepping in between to broker a meridian based "compromise," "giving" south america to spain. (the catholic church once again proving to be perhaps the most destructive force world wide the past 500 years (onward)) but the thing was, africa was already trading abundantly throughout the continent and beyond, most notably with muslim countries -- which european countries were also trading with --. part of christian europe's "excuse" for african enslavement and extraction was for being "pagan," favoring an adjacent holy book islam. trading along west africa resulted in the naming of coasts associated with "goods," including gold, pepper, and slave. much of internal african enslavement was territorial based, captured people weren't seen as property, more conquered and assimilated; still forcefully that is, but important distinction in terms of french's - focus on modernity -, while europe stopped trading material goods for goods, and focused on gaining labor, people as property. french takes this basis and extends the connection to lesser known histories involving sugar production, barbados, haiti, colonial america, numerous slave revolts (some even considering the american revolution the largest), the political/international aftermath, europe's further landlocked division of africa and its consequences, all frightening related to how slavery has been implemented into modern business management. when someone ignorantly says the likes of, "why didn't "they" fight back?" in regards to these human atrocities, 'born in blackness' shows hundreds of pages of african resistance and innovation over hundreds of years. an enlightening and informative work, highly recommended.
February 21, 2023
This feels like one of the most important books I’ve ever read. As a history buff, I’d never really stopped to consider what was happening in Africa while the conquistadores were overrunning the Aztec and Inca empires, and this book gave a thorough description not only of several wealthy, well-run African kingdoms (such as that of Mansa Musa, whose name is vaguely familiar) but also of how African gold financed so many of these expeditions. The economics of slavery in turn converted the American colonies of Spain, France, Portugal, and Britain into lucrative and valuable territories, worth fighting over in the Thirty Years War and the like. By eliminating most of the costs of labor, while literally working people to death, slavers turned sugar cane and then cotton into cash crops that revolutionized European economies, with American cotton feeding the British mills that would spark the Industrial Revolution.
Throughout this book I was struck again and again by the importance of Black history, of the incredible societies that existed in Africa before the transatlantic slave trade took off and the terrible toll on those societies taken by the loss of so many working-age men and women kidnapped and sold into slavery. The slave trade led to the rise of the West over the Rest, yet the contributions of Africans and African Americans to world history are so often relegated to elective classes instead of being included alongside any discussion of history from 1492 onward. Hearing these stories of great African civilizations, terrible economic innovations, and even debunking some myths — such as the “slavery existed in Africa” myth which elides the difference between America’s race-based chattel slavery and African warfare slavery — felt like illuminating a corner of history that is often ignored because it is unpleasant and uncomfortable to consider; however, I thought the book was empowering and awe-inspiring as it acknowledged the contributions of Africans and their descendants on Western civilization in an amazing, profound way.
Throughout this book I was struck again and again by the importance of Black history, of the incredible societies that existed in Africa before the transatlantic slave trade took off and the terrible toll on those societies taken by the loss of so many working-age men and women kidnapped and sold into slavery. The slave trade led to the rise of the West over the Rest, yet the contributions of Africans and African Americans to world history are so often relegated to elective classes instead of being included alongside any discussion of history from 1492 onward. Hearing these stories of great African civilizations, terrible economic innovations, and even debunking some myths — such as the “slavery existed in Africa” myth which elides the difference between America’s race-based chattel slavery and African warfare slavery — felt like illuminating a corner of history that is often ignored because it is unpleasant and uncomfortable to consider; however, I thought the book was empowering and awe-inspiring as it acknowledged the contributions of Africans and their descendants on Western civilization in an amazing, profound way.
November 28, 2021
This book was excellent. I have been looking for a good history of Africa’s engagement with Europe in the late Renaissance through to the modern era and this is a fantastic read. I think the author oversells some of his conclusions but definitely recommend this as a tome worth reading. Deeply researched and engagingly written.
May 26, 2022
French’s book is perhaps one of the best newer books on the subject that I have found, and I really have to recommend it highly. There need to be so many basic and fundamental shifts favoring actual unbiased truth in how African, European settler-colonial, indigenous, and African American history are taught, and French’s text is extremely powerful in fulfilling this responsibility to moral scholarship.
An important aspect of white genocide against indigenous people in the Southeast especially was to clear the land for plantation agriculture that exploited enslaved African labor. This is extremely important in areas like Louisiana and the Mississippi Valley, where over a million enslaved descendants of Africans were "sold down the river" in one of the largest forced migrations on American history after indigenous people had been forced off their ancestral lands. Now, almost no American who has gone through the American education system really gets a picture of this. Maybe they get an emotive story about the Trail of Tears, which is good as far as it goes, but not the entire context of actual genocide against indigenous people that was very much as model for Hitler and the Nazis. Hitler wasn't a scholar. He was an ignoramus and a joke in many ways, like many cruel and evil people. But Hitler saw this specific part of American history as a model to be emulated in his conquest of Eastern Europe. I think this should be a basic and mandatory thing to teach, as well as the actual evil of white settler colonialism and indigenous genocide and the erasure of any kind of owning of responsibility for reparations for the descendants of enslaved Africans who actually did the work that created the wealth and infrastructure for the US.
I also wish that when we talk about the evils of white settler colonialism, we would understand how much the genocide against indigenous peoples here inspired these devilish colonizers. How many of us connect the French colonization of Algeria to the American model, for example?
“The results of the Indian removal and subsequent settlement by whites was so absolute that the violent history of the Mississippi River Valley in this era would inspire white settler movements promoted by European governments elsewhere well into the next century. These included places in southern Africa and Kenya, as well as French-dominated Algeria. As Claudio Saunt wrote in Unworthy Republic, ‘Notoriously, during the Nazi conquest of Eastern Europe, Hitler equated ‘indigenous inhabitants’ with ‘Indians’’ and declared “the Volga must our Mississippi.’” (French 384)
An important aspect of white genocide against indigenous people in the Southeast especially was to clear the land for plantation agriculture that exploited enslaved African labor. This is extremely important in areas like Louisiana and the Mississippi Valley, where over a million enslaved descendants of Africans were "sold down the river" in one of the largest forced migrations on American history after indigenous people had been forced off their ancestral lands. Now, almost no American who has gone through the American education system really gets a picture of this. Maybe they get an emotive story about the Trail of Tears, which is good as far as it goes, but not the entire context of actual genocide against indigenous people that was very much as model for Hitler and the Nazis. Hitler wasn't a scholar. He was an ignoramus and a joke in many ways, like many cruel and evil people. But Hitler saw this specific part of American history as a model to be emulated in his conquest of Eastern Europe. I think this should be a basic and mandatory thing to teach, as well as the actual evil of white settler colonialism and indigenous genocide and the erasure of any kind of owning of responsibility for reparations for the descendants of enslaved Africans who actually did the work that created the wealth and infrastructure for the US.
I also wish that when we talk about the evils of white settler colonialism, we would understand how much the genocide against indigenous peoples here inspired these devilish colonizers. How many of us connect the French colonization of Algeria to the American model, for example?
“The results of the Indian removal and subsequent settlement by whites was so absolute that the violent history of the Mississippi River Valley in this era would inspire white settler movements promoted by European governments elsewhere well into the next century. These included places in southern Africa and Kenya, as well as French-dominated Algeria. As Claudio Saunt wrote in Unworthy Republic, ‘Notoriously, during the Nazi conquest of Eastern Europe, Hitler equated ‘indigenous inhabitants’ with ‘Indians’’ and declared “the Volga must our Mississippi.’” (French 384)
June 9, 2022
This is one of the most remarkable books I've ever read -- and I've read thousands. French demonstrates that historians have fundamentally, and in many cases willfully, misunderstood the origins of the modern world, simply -- and yet profoundly -- by ignoring or (to be kind) underestimating -- the absolute centrality of African slavery in the shaping of almost every aspect of what we've come to call "the West." French's argument is absolutely persuasive, and it will absolutely change the way I teach and think about not just African American, but American, history. And if you teach World or Western Civ (I'm looking at you, Jane and Cindy), you should read this tout suite. Or at least familiarize yourself with its argument, because it is a game-changer. A brilliant addition to the historiography, Born to Blackness will be read and argued about for years to come.
September 3, 2022
An exceptional and thought-provoking book.
Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War, by French, is an exceptional and well written and researched book that challenges the way history has been taught and told by whites. The author digs deep into the historical record to deconstruct three compelling, long-lasting and damaging myths — the era of European explorers, the industrial revolution and American exceptionalism — and then reassembles them, appropriately, around slavery. The modern era, in this more accurate retelling, was driven by greed, built on cruelty, and ushered in by the toil and trauma of enslaved Africans (with a little genocide thrown in for good measure). A long, challenging and worthy read, this book should not be missed.
Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War, by French, is an exceptional and well written and researched book that challenges the way history has been taught and told by whites. The author digs deep into the historical record to deconstruct three compelling, long-lasting and damaging myths — the era of European explorers, the industrial revolution and American exceptionalism — and then reassembles them, appropriately, around slavery. The modern era, in this more accurate retelling, was driven by greed, built on cruelty, and ushered in by the toil and trauma of enslaved Africans (with a little genocide thrown in for good measure). A long, challenging and worthy read, this book should not be missed.
August 12, 2022
Mr. French writes a brilliant book exploring the role of Africa and the people of African descent in the development of the Atlantic and Modern World. I feel that his book does a good job of laying out the role Africa played in driving European exploration and their subsequent development. Most of the content of this book feels like it is a key foundation to World History, that is often left buried. All of it fits with what I have learned before, but previous authors stopped before really digging into the critical role of Africa, Africans, and slavery. For example, he discusses the idea that New World sugar and coffee fueled the Enlightenment, and then points out that those products were almost entirely dependent on slavery to produce enough for European markets. He convincingly lays out the important but overlooked role of Africa in World History.
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