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

by Howard W. French

As the historian David Geggus wrote of the Caribbean, “No other part of the world was ruled from Europe for so long or had such a large proportion of its population living as slaves.” Europeans waged extraordinary struggles among themselves throughout this period for control of the region. A long era of Spanish dominance that began with Columbus was followed by a chaotic scramble that in turn drew in the Dutch, the English, and the French, and this was followed, lastly, by a period of quasi-British hegemony, but one punctuated by enormous wealth production by French slaves on Saint Domingue. Throughout, maritime forces, both formal navies and privateers, were the main instruments of commercial expansion, with each power determined not only to outcompete its rivals, but to subvert or evict them. Some have wrongly preferred theories for this behavior that depend on abstract motivations, such as the pursuit of glory. In reality, the imperial contest over the Caribbean was driven by a realist understanding that power flows in good part from wealth, whose sources must be controlled lest one’s rivals seize them to one’s detriment or peril.