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.
