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

by Howard W. French

I believe that the sooner denial about the large and foundational role that slavery played in creating American power and prosperity is put to definitive rest, the better Americans as a people will come to understand both themselves and their country’s true place in world history. What is abundantly clear, even at a glance, is that during the decade or two that followed the American Revolution, the United States in its infancy remained a relatively minor player in the economy of the greater Atlantic; it was a country with considerable potential, to be sure, and yet anything but a predestined powerhouse or the economic dynamo that it later became. In the space of a short few decades, though, meaning by the middle of the nineteenth century, it had ridden plantation slavery—based on one crop above all, cotton—to become a rapidly industrializing nation and an incipient world power. Indeed, as one historian has written, “The cotton trade was the economy’s only ‘major expansive force.’”