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

by Howard W. French

War between European states in this era should not be understood only classically, in the unending scroll of alliances, counteralliances, tactics, and outcomes that fill history books. It must also be seen, more candidly, in terms of what it was so often about, something both novel and profoundly transformative. By this we mean the control of large, overseas empires. But even that term obfuscates. Over the span of four centuries this struggle consisted, in large part, of a long series of unconventional and largely undeclared conflicts that were waged for control over Africa and Africans and especially over the domination and exploitation of the Black body. Put to work in stringently coordinated and heavily policed ways, the rents extracted from Africans became far more valuable even than the yellow metal extracted from the continent in the sixteenth century had been as a natural resource. One could do worse than to think of the people shipped in chains across the Atlantic as black gold. The Scramble for Africans went beyond that, though. It was a global contest not just for the supply of slaves but simultaneously for the Guadeloupes of the world—meaning the tropical places where captive peoples could be put to the most productive use. And it was war over these things, above all, wars deemed worth endless fighting and armament and dying, that forged the most successful modern European states.