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

by Howard W. French

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.