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

by Howard W. French

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.