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

by Howard W. French

The first impetus for the Age of Discovery 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.

Events and activities that flowed from Afro-European encounters set the most Atlantic-oriented Europeans onto a path that would eventually propel their continent past the great civilizational centers of Asia and the Islamic world in both wealth and power. This ascension was not founded upon any innate or permanent European characteristics that produced superiority. To a degree that remains unrecognized, it was built on the foundation of Europe’s economic and political relations with Africa. The heart of the matter here, of course, was the massive, centuries-long transatlantic trade in slaves who were put to work by the millions growing sugar, tobacco, cotton, and other cash crops on the plantations of the New World.

As Portugal ventured out into the world in the early fifteenth century—and for nearly a century this meant almost exclusively the world of Africa—its people were among the first to make another conceptual leap. They began to think of discovery not merely as the simple act of stumbling upon assorted novelties or arriving wide-eyed in never-before-visited places, but rather as something new and more abstract. Discovery became a mind-set and this would become another cornerstone of modernism; it meant understanding that the world was infinite in its social complexity, and this required a broadening of consciousness, even amid the colossal violence and horror that accompanied this process, and an ever more systematic unmooring from provincialism.

more than any other part of the world, Africa has been the linchpin of the machine of modernity. Without African peoples trafficked from its shores, the Americas would have counted for little in the ascendance of the West. African labor, in the form of slaves, became the providential factor that made the very mise en valeur or development of the Americas possible. Without it, Europe’s colonial projects in the New World, such as we know them, are simply unimaginable.

Through the development of plantation agriculture, and a succession of history-altering commercial crops—tobacco, coffee, cacao, indigo, rice, and, above all, sugar—Europe’s deep and often brutal ties with Africa drove the birth of a truly global capitalist economy. Slave-grown sugar hastened the coming together of the processes we call industrialization. It radically transformed diets, making possible much higher worker productivity. And in doing so, sugar completely revolutionized European society. As readers will discover, this includes playing a critical but largely uncredited role in the anchoring of democracy on that continent. In sugar’s wake, cotton grown by slaves in the American South helped launch formal industrialization, along with an immense second wave of consumerism. After plentiful calories, abundant and varied clothing for the masses became a reality for the first time in human history. As revealed here, the scale and the scope of the American antebellum cotton boom, which made this possible, were nothing short of astonishing. This made the value derived from the trade and ownership of slaves in America alone, as distinct from the cotton and other products they produced, greater than that of all of the country’s factories, railroads, and canals combined.

islands like Barbados and Jamaica were far more important in their day than were the English colonies that would become the United States. The nation now known as Haiti, even more so. In the eighteenth century it became the richest colony in history, and in the nineteenth, by dint of its slave population’s successful revolution, 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.

why, beginning in the first half of the fifteenth century, did Europeans, led principally by the Portuguese, begin to mount a determined push for trade opportunities and political relations with what had previously been regarded as impossibly remote and inaccessible regions of Africa? What drove them to overcome their long-standing fears and superstitions to do so? Obscure though it may be to contemporary readers, little-known Djenné constitutes an important piece of this story. Early centers of urbanization like this one—city-states, in effect—became swept up in a process of empire formation in a part of Africa that would soon become as outward looking as Portugal or Spain, only long before the oceanic explorations of the Iberians. In fact, the most famous of these Sudanic empires, Mali, which succeeded Ghana in the thirteenth century, and gave the present-day country its name, was ruled at the turn of the fourteenth century by an emperor named Abu Bakr II, whose personal obsession was reaching the western limits of the Atlantic Ocean by boat. This was more than a century and a half before Columbus set out for the New World from Andalusia.

Mansā Mūsā arrived in Cairo on horseback on July 18, 1324, “under very large banners or flags with yellow symbols on a red background.” As the following account aims to make clear, this date, remembered by virtually no one save for historians of medieval Africa, merits consideration as one of the most important moments in the making of the Atlantic world.

IN THE SPACE OF LESS THAN two hundred years, from the early fourteenth century to the end of the fifteenth, the course of world history changed in more lastingly transformative ways than it had during any comparable period in previous human experience. Since that time, perhaps only the Industrial Revolution has changed human life more.

all the world’s major population centers on each of its continents were brought into permanent and sustained contact with one another for the first time, generating the most profound of consequences. Societies, nations, and entire regions were jolted into motion as a result, their trajectories careering like ping-pong balls in a lottery machine as they collided, with some that had earlier shown no exceptional promise suddenly rising fast and others left behind or sent reeling in sharp decline or violent demise. Vast new empires were launched, and with them were born immense movements of people and of goods, as well as plants, animals, foods, and also diseases transferred from one part of the world to another. More than any other fact, mobility on a scale never witnessed before in all of history became the new name of the game. And at the heart of this movement lay a terrible phenomenon, the mass trafficking of human beings who were transported in chains from the continent of their birth, Africa, to new and utterly unfamiliar places, first to Europe, and then to what quickly came to be known as the New World. Its handmaiden, of course, was the idea of race as a principle for determining a person’s enslavability.

An abundance of modern scholarship shows that more than any other cause or explanation it was the sensation stirred by news of Mansā Mūsā’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 Catalan Atlas did more than alert European royalty to the suspected location of the world’s greatest source of the precious metal. It drove an explosion of a new kind of mapmaking that had the mysteries of African geography as its focus. This, more than dreams of India or technological advances in and of themselves, gave the incentive for ever bolder exploration.

The history of maritime exploration during the hundred years after the publication of the Catalan Atlas would be dominated not by thoughts of Asia but by the emphatic desire to nail down the source of West Africa’s wealth in gold.

The Canaries seldom feature in world history books, and even less in discussions of current affairs, but this was the very first European colony in the Atlantic, and indeed the place where Portuguese, Spaniards, and others deepened their taste for overseas empire, along with many of the darkest methods of achieving it. These included chattel slavery, genocide, violent religious indoctrination, and settler colonialism, all of which saw their Atlantic debuts on these islands.

Few notions have remained so persistent and unexamined as the belief that Europe’s subsequent global rise was due to superiority of one form or another. This is true whether one considers technology, belief systems, or a notion that has become widely but not universally repudiated today: innate racial qualities. Nowadays, the idea that medieval Europeans enjoyed any lead whatsoever in science and technology over Muslims, South Asians, or East Asians doesn’t withstand even passing scrutiny; as we have already seen with navigation, in many areas Europeans, in fact, lagged quite significantly. Equally dubious is the once common belief that there was something unique about Christianity that inclined Europeans to advantageous cultural virtues like reason, enterprise, and thrift. Confucianism, to pick but one of many possible counterexamples, clearly suffers nothing by comparison with Christianity in any of these regards.

What the Portuguese sought was not a way around Africa, as has been frequently supposed, but a way into it that sidestepped the hostile Maghreb region.

Framed at its simplest, gold had led the Portuguese to slaves, and slaves drove the expansion of a lucrative new industry, sugar, which would transform the world like few products have in history, and in doing so would also produce one of history’s greatest human tolls.

while African gold powered Lisbon’s rise, the initiation of a major Atlantic trade in slaves that grew out of Portugal’s experiences here would soon make a coming revolution in plantation agriculture possible, along with the utterly transformative new wealth that it produced in the North Atlantic.

Here, for the very first time, we find fully racialized slavery for the production of processed agricultural exports into foreign markets. São Tomé’s plantations, in other words, were designed for and run exclusively on the basis of the violent domination of Black African slave labor. This would prove to be the indispensable killer apparatus of modernity. And it was from the harbors of São Tomé that the model soon spread to the New World, with all of the grotesque inhumanity inherent to it.

until 1820, four times more Africans were brought across the Atlantic to the New World than Europeans.

everything Berlin has argued here about a new type of descendants of Africa—some Black, many mixed race—is almost equally true of the whites who would come to populate the New World. They were just as much transformed by intercourse with new “others” as Black people, and would be no more “European” as a result than the people with a dominant African ancestry in the New World would continue to be “African.” More than anything else, it was these contacts and the resultant brassage, or mixing, culturally, racially, socially, economically, through innumerable dislocations, unions, and traumas, that made the Americas a new and utterly distinctive realm, a truly New World, and ultimately the most powerful engine of modernity there’s ever been. Processes like these were at the origins of everything unique and original about the Americas, down to jazz and the blues.

This is not to say there has not been a toxic side to this reality. As widespread as it is, the brassage in America’s cauldron has always been partial or incomplete. Blacks were the catalyst that made an American society possible, but a catalyst that for the most part went selectively unabsorbed in the mixing process. Their presence and their persistent relegation to limited and secondary roles served to bind the others, including the rankest of newcomers. And in doing so, it served to create and to elevate whiteness, producing a legacy that we have powerfully suffered from and still struggle to emerge from today. As Toni Morrison once put it: Blacks were steady. Everybody could look down on them. Immigrant Italians. Immigrant Polish. There was always a bottom that you could be hostile to. And that was what brought the country together as a melting pot. . . . What was the basis of the cauldron, the pot? Well black people were the pot. Everything else was, you know, melted together and, what, American. That’s how you get to be American.

We will call this earlier and longer-lasting scramble a Scramble for Africans. And it was this centuries-long scramble, which followed Portugal’s construction of the fort at Elmina—messy, drawn out, and mostly unplanned—that delivered to us our modern world.

War between European states in this era should not be understood only classically, in the unending scroll of alliances, counteralliances, tactics, and outcomes that fill history books. It must also be seen, more candidly, in terms of what it was so often about, something both novel and profoundly transformative. By this we mean the control of large, overseas empires. But even that term obfuscates. Over the span of four centuries this struggle consisted, in large part, of a long series of unconventional and largely undeclared conflicts that were waged for control over Africa and Africans and especially over the domination and exploitation of the Black body. Put to work in stringently coordinated and heavily policed ways, the rents extracted from Africans became far more valuable even than the yellow metal extracted from the continent in the sixteenth century had been as a natural resource. One could do worse than to think of the people shipped in chains across the Atlantic as black gold. The Scramble for Africans went beyond that, though. It was a global contest not just for the supply of slaves but simultaneously for the Guadeloupes of the world—meaning the tropical places where captive peoples could be put to the most productive use. And it was war over these things, above all, wars deemed worth endless fighting and armament and dying, that forged the most successful modern European states.

Practical limitations on harnessing indigenous laborers like these led the Portuguese to consider substituting Africans for Indians in the first place. And without the arrival of millions of enslaved Africans, it is hard to imagine a whole chain of familiar historical developments that followed. The New World would not have been made viable anywhere near the extent that it did. Without their prosperous colonies, the major imperial nations of Europe, and indeed Europe overall, would have become far less rich and powerful. And without this wealth and power, coupled to growing European diasporas in the Americas, what would be left of the vague but by now unavoidable term “the West”? The heavy weight of the present is such that this is all hard to imagine. But without this interlocking suite of developments, Europe might very well have remained a kind of geographic and civilizational dead end. Without its hold on a New World made viable and profitable by enslaving Africans, there is little reason to believe the place nowadays fancied as the Old Continent wouldn’t have continued to lag behind the leading centers of global civilization in Asia and the Islamic world.

Historians, demographers, environmental scientists, and experts in numerous other disciplines are still struggling to provide an exhaustive and definitive account of the tragic population collapse that befell the indigenous peoples of the Americas. A thorough review of the most recent findings is beyond the scope of this work, but a narrative like this cannot proceed without at least offering a big-picture sense of the native cataclysm. The waves of epidemic and expiration that followed the arrival of whites became part of what has been described as a hemisphere-wide Great Dying. One recent study has suggested that this event killed as many as 56 million people, or roughly 90 percent of the overall hemispheric population of indigenous Americans between the time of first European contact and the start of the seventeenth century. Such a number would make the deadly transmission of diseases like these by far the largest mortality event in proportion to the global population in human history, and second only to World War II in absolute terms with regard to the number of people killed. Others, meanwhile, have criticized what they regard as an excessive focus on pathogens alone, insisting instead on the effects of warfare and of constant, forced displacement, which resulted in both “material deprivation and starvation, conditions that favored disease.” To give a clearer idea of what numbers of this magnitude might mean in practical terms in a given region of the Americas, though...

During Brazil’s first decades of sugar cultivation, production was too small and the available investment capital from Europe insufficient to finance a large-scale trade in African slaves. The Portuguese in Brazil thus relied almost exclusively on forced indigenous labor until about 1560, when they began a gradual but fateful transition to Black labor that took forty years to complete. But once African slavery began to take hold, there would be no turning back. Brazil would eventually account for more traffic in slaves for plantation labor than any other country— roughly 40 percent of the total of Africans landed in the Americas. Surprisingly, given this, Africans were originally imported not as field slaves at all, but as manservants and as skilled workers, used in such roles as sugar master, purger (whose job was to remove impurities from the cane during the refining process), and blacksmith. But as forced African labor in Brazil came to predominate, most of the work performed by Blacks inevitably consisted of backbreaking plantation labor.

The product of their output made the sugar industry an important, if still unheralded building block of what became the industrialized West. First, it provided Europe with a powerful financial stimulus. Beyond the most obvious benefits from the sugar business—the revenues and profits that it generated directly—one must also look at what economists call multiplier effects, which stemmed from the many spin-offs and ancillary businesses that flowed from sugar, and from the rapidly expanding world of plantation economies. In terms of scale, perhaps the biggest of these was the exploding slave trade itself, which sugar drove like nothing else, before or after. Finally, there was the technically demanding nature of sugar’s production. Harvesting, pressing of the cane, boiling, and other processing steps were all highly time sensitive and needed to be carefully synchronized in order to ensure both efficiency and quality. As they came to be integrated operations, sugar plantations and the mills they fed with cane, moreover, became some of the largest industries anywhere. The Caribbean still lies ahead in our story, but once sugar took off there, two thousand or more slaves per integrated plantation was not uncommon, making them far larger in size than almost any businesses known in Europe. As the historian Caitlin Rosenthal has written, “Only in the mid-nineteenth century would the largest factories begin to approach the scales of late eighteenth-century plantations. Josiah Wedgwo...

In remarkably little time, the conjoining of these elements (the boundless fertile land of northeastern Brazil, and the cheap and seemingly inexhaustible supply of slaves from Central Africa) produced one of the most spectacular events in the economic history of the early modern Western world. Starting from a paltry output in 1570, soon after Blacks began to be trafficked to Brazil in substantial numbers, sugar production grew at fantastical rates. By 1580, slave labor in the Portuguese colony already was generating 180,000 arrobas of the commodity, or three times the output of Madeira and São Tomé combined. By 1614, the crop had surpassed 700,000 arrobas, orders of magnitude greater than what those small islands had ever produced. Output would soon hit 1 million arrobas, or roughly 14.5 long tons. To modern ears, this may not sound like such an impressive quantity, but for its day and age, this was an unheard-of deluge of a good that was just beginning to wreak transformational effects on diet, economy, and society in Europe.

no part of continental America was bootstrapped more dramatically than New England, whose farmers and fishermen focused heavily on supplying Barbados and the greater, sugar-growing Caribbean. In fact, as much as any Enlightenment ideals, it was the West Indian roots of New England’s rising prosperity—freeing the merchants and farmers of places like Boston, Salem, and Providence from economic reliance on the English homeland—that fueled a nascent thinking about independence in this part of British America. As the historian Wendy Warren has noted, “[B]y the 1680s, more than half of the ships anchored in Boston’s harbor on any given day were involved in West Indian trade, and almost half of the boats trading in the West Indies had set sail from New England home ports.”

It was the devastation of the plantation worlds of Brazil during the back-and-forth contests between Portugal and the Dutch, though, that provided Barbadian sugar, and England in the West Indies, with decisive historic opportunities.

This put Britain on a path to dominate the slave trade outright, as it would for the next century and a half, propelling its imperial expansion throughout the Caribbean, and its widening empire generally. By the end of this period, the Company of Royal Adventurers, and its successor, the Royal African Company of England, founded in 1672, would ship more men, women, and children from Africa to the New World than any other entity or institution.

New commercial outfits like the Company also became critical innovators in the sense that they were formed on the basis of association of capital by disparate investors, not unlike a modern corporation. This is just one of many ways that the slave trade of this era, as it ramped up quickly, would drive the modernization of business, politics, and society in Mother England, while steadily touching a wide variety of associated industries, including banking, shipping, and insurance. More than has been recognized, slavery even contributed to the emergence of a system of rival political parties, Whigs and Tories; to the growth of the City of London as a financial center; and to the blossoming of British power and prosperity more generally. In the words of the late historian of Atlantic slavery Joseph C. Miller, plantations, monopoly companies, and new sugar colonies like Barbados constituted “controlled laboratories for early investment and management,” that were responsible for “creating golden modernity from monarchical lead.”

To a significant degree, the populations of Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and even Rhode Island and Massachusetts would be seeded by white people from Barbados as well.

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.

“It was the wealth accumulated from West Indian trade which more than anything else underlay the prosperity and civilization of New England and the Middle Colonies.”

To better understand North America’s dependence on trade with the sugar islands, it helps to put a figure on the kind of wealth disparities that existed within the British Empire. Taking Jamaica as an example, one historian has estimated that annual per capita income among whites on that island in the decade that Williams wrote of was more than thirty-five times higher than in Britain’s mainland colonies, £2201, compared with £60.2.

Per capita consumption of sugar in England rose from about 2 pounds per person in the 1660s to 4 pounds per person by the 1690s and continued to expand in the eighteenth century. By the time of the American Revolution, every man, woman and child in England on average consumed 23 pounds of sugar a year. . . . British colonists on the North American mainland imported less than half as much sugar, about 14 pounds per person in 1770, but made up for it with a much higher consumption of sugar’s by-products, rum and molasses.

The entry of cheap sugar into the English diet did far more than produce an onslaught of cakes, tarts, and other confectionary goods. It paved the way for caffeine-containing beverages like coffee, which was also slave grown in the Americas (as well as cocoa, another stimulant), and tea, which followed the coffee craze to become the national drink a century later. Because water supplies were often unhygienic, many English had hitherto favored ale, consuming it even during daytime work hours, which inevitably produced lethargic if not disorderly behavior. The era of Big Sugar therefore ushered in a new age of alertness based on drinks that had the additional benefit of being hygienic, because their preparation required boiling water. And at roughly the same moment, with these new stimulants came yet another, tobacco, which had the additional merit for the workplace, if not for long-term health, of suppressing appetite. As the historian of the Caribbean Randy Brown told me in summing up the shift that underpinned the Industrial Revolution, “they switched from downers to uppers.”

The era of Barbados’s takeoff and of the sugar revolution that it produced was one of fundamental change in the development in Britain of what we now call civil society. The availability of hot, sweetened, stimulating drinks gave birth to the first coffee shop, which opened its doors in Oxford in 1650. From there, coffee shops quickly spread to London, where they proliferated, and this in turn helped rapidly establish a medium only recently invented in Germany: the newspaper. Gathering places like coffee shops and the availability of regularly printed political news in this format are what gave birth to a modern public sphere, to employ the terminology of the German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas. This is a fancy way of referring to the emergence of a richly enhanced shared sense of public affairs and citizen participation that emerged during the Enlightenment. For Habermas, conversations over caffeinated drink and newspapers in places like the coffee shop marked “the first time in history [that people] came together as equals to reason critically about public affairs.”

To a degree that has never been recognized, it was upon the bedrock of their strength and their will to endure and survive the horrors of slavery that much of the wealth and power of subsequent centuries of predominant Western capitalism was founded. The Atlantic world was not just made viable through their labor. Yes, as we have claimed here, it was this appropriated toil that generated nearly all of the commodities and much of the gold and silver that helped fuel the ascension of the West. But that is not all. Far from it. More important still, it was the very founding of this Atlantic world, an unprecedentedly large geographic sphere spanning four continents, that created what we now think of and understand as the West, and this is what made the very greatness that we associate with this geographical notion possible. Without the Americas and their long and deep connections to Africa, what would Europe have weighed in the historical balance of the last half millennium? To answer the question is to not only challenge our understanding of modern history, but to fundamentally reconsider Western identity itself. What has most distinguished modern Europe from other regions of the world is not so much any qualities intrinsic to it, as cultural chauvinists and those who fixate on race profess, but rather the fact that its peoples spanned the Atlantic at a particularly opportune moment in time, utterly transforming life on every shore, thanks to the indispensable contribution of...

As the historian David Geggus wrote of the Caribbean, “No other part of the world was ruled from Europe for so long or had such a large proportion of its population living as slaves.” Europeans waged extraordinary struggles among themselves throughout this period for control of the region. A long era of Spanish dominance that began with Columbus was followed by a chaotic scramble that in turn drew in the Dutch, the English, and the French, and this was followed, lastly, by a period of quasi-British hegemony, but one punctuated by enormous wealth production by French slaves on Saint Domingue. Throughout, maritime forces, both formal navies and privateers, were the main instruments of commercial expansion, with each power determined not only to outcompete its rivals, but to subvert or evict them. Some have wrongly preferred theories for this behavior that depend on abstract motivations, such as the pursuit of glory. In reality, the imperial contest over the Caribbean was driven by a realist understanding that power flows in good part from wealth, whose sources must be controlled lest one’s rivals seize them to one’s detriment or peril.

Why again would Europeans have consented to so much expenditure and submitted themselves to so much bother if slave-based empires in the New World were not deemed vitally important to them? Why is it that the leading nations of Europe had been so willing to fight and die for these islands for so long, if this new mode of empire building based squarely on slave power had not been immensely profitable, as some have pretended?

WITH ITS RANK AND centuries-long exploitation of Africans, the plantation-complex was the most important driver of wealth in the New World, and indeed in driving the ascension of the West. As readers have seen, far more than silver and gold, it was agricultural commodities procured through Black suffering and effort that lofted the North Atlantic onto an entirely new trajectory, allowing it to dominate the new modern age.

The first Black man to arrive in the Americas, Alonso Prieto, landed in 1493 on a Spanish vessel, as a free member of Columbus’s second expedition. By 1501, the enslavement of Africans had clearly been introduced into the New World, beginning in the settlement that Columbus founded, Hispaniola. That was nearly a quarter century before the first direct shipment of slaves from the continent to the New World, via São Tomé, which did not occur until 1525.

In the sixteenth century, approximately 277,000 Africans were brought in chains across the Atlantic, with nearly 90 percent of them going to Spain’s newly conquered American territories, led by Cartagena, New Spain, and Veracruz. Over its long course, this human traffic would bring an estimated 2.07 million people to the Spanish Americas, either by direct shipment across the Atlantic, or via a lively intra-American trade, trafficked onward from places like Dutch Curaçao or English Jamaica. This made the Spanish Americas the second most important zone of forced permanent African migration, after Brazil. As a region, it places well ahead of either the British or French Caribbean, and it saw vastly greater slave traffic than what, somewhat paradoxically, is the most heavily documented region of the trade by far: the English colonies that later became the United States. In no other part of the New World has the trade in Africans been so little studied, and nowhere has the historical erasure of Blacks been so shockingly complete. And yet the available evidence shows that Africans were just as indispensable to making Hispanic Latin America viable as they were in the domains of the hemisphere’s other major European colonial powers.*

As they strove to sustain their supplies of foreign cloths, Venetian beads and fine porcelain, silk, sundry manufactured goods, and guns in increasingly high volumes, Africans living along the coast had also gradually come to understand that what the Europeans prized most was Black bodies. And for the most part, as long as these captives came from rival neighboring states, leaders of the balkanized societies along the coast felt little moral compunction about selling them.

it is important to consider that in an era when few Africans had yet made return voyages to Europe, and almost none had any picture of the purposes to which Africans were being put in the New World, little synthetic or unified sense of African identity existed. Because of this, there is no reason to assume any common sense of intra-African solidarity, certainly nothing akin to the shared identity that Africans and members of the African diaspora widely celebrate today.* On the Gold Coast, like in Upper Guinea, an organized slave trade that predated the transatlantic market had long-standing connections to Sudanic Africa and to human traffic across the Sahara. But as we will see shortly, even in Central Africa, with its much more tenuous links to intercontinental and long-distance trade, preexisting practices of slavery and of the forms of commerce associated with it meant that when European demand strongly manifested itself in the sixteenth century, local markets quickly responded.

no African state of any size would be conquered by Europeans until the nineteenth century, not even in the face of the intense and sustained contact that drove the slave trade.

what would have happened to the political map of Africa over time had Europeans not arrived when they did, hell-bent on trading for gold and, later, for slaves?