Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War

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I was drawn to this book primarily because Bill Gates recommended it as one of his top two reads this year. These days, the importance of the role of transatlantic slavery is better known and more studied than it was in the past – and rightly so. This book, though, is about much more than that, for French offers a wider view of how and why Africa and its people’s histories have been ignored, showing how the exploitation of the Americas and the Caribbean brought ecological dividends that then reshaped the world. 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.” 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.

Book review: how Africa was central to the making of the

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance. He writes: “The gigantic boost that [this gold] provided the [Portuguese] crown … made it possible for Lisbon to keep pace with Spain in their headlong course into ocean faring, discovery, conquest, crusading, and intercontinental trade.” As the author explains, the boom of the cotton, sugar and tobacco industries of the colonial US simply would not have happened without the trade of slaves from Africa. Without this “capitalist jolt” as French puts it, what we know now as the United States of America would have remained relatively obscure. It would not likely have become the superpower state it is today. Planters on the island bought slaves in increasing numbers with money “raised from willing creditors in England against future deliveries of sugar.” A Barbadian decree in 1636 laid down that slaves would remain in bondage for life, offering the template for servitude throughout the hemisphere. Barbados, says Mr. French, was not merely “a pioneer in the development of chattel slavery”; it became “an enormously powerful driver of history” through the “prodigious wealth” it would generate. In 1600, Brazil had supplied nearly all of Western Europe’s sugar; by 1700, thanks to disruptions in Brazil caused by Dutch-Portuguese warring, Barbados alone supplied half of Europe’s sugar fix. 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.

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). Howard 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. 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). Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Born in Blackness’ Review: Slavery and Capital at - AEI ‘Born in Blackness’ Review: Slavery and Capital at - AEI

The book’s main aim, French explains early on, is to restore those key chapters which articulate Africa’s significance to our common narrative of modernity to their proper place of prominence. Please report metadata errors at the source library. If there are multiple source libraries, know that we pull metadata from top to bottom, so the first one might be sufficient. This book is filled with countless eyeopeners… All history is, by definition, revisionist. In connecting the various dots, French is inviting us to reconsider what we understand about how we got here.... Painful and necessary… [an] infuriating and hugely enlightening book." Financial Times - Dele Olojede

Lauren van der Rede receives funding from the Early Career Academic Development programme of the Division of Research Development, Stellenbosch University. Partners The way we think about history is entirely wrong, says Howard W French at the start of this magnificent, powerful and absorbing book. The problem is not just that the people and cultures of Africa have been ignored and left to one side; rather, that they have been so miscast that the story of the global past has become part of a profound “mistelling”. Using Biglan’s and Holland’s Classifications to Understand Similarities and Differences Between Disciplines in Multidisciplinary/Interdisciplinary Education Q. How do I create a Gates Notes account? A. There are three ways you can create a Gates Notes account: 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.