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

by Howard W. French

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.