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

by Howard W. French

I have drawn heavily upon the work of recent generation of historians—some of them quoted or cited here, and many others who are not. Taken together, their research has offered new clarity and depth about the ways in which the rise of the United States was predicated directly on slavery and especially on the wealth generated by the cotton-growing South. This ongoing revolution in historiography has helped overturn a number of long held notions, some of which border on a denial of slavery’s fundamental economic importance to America. Among other things, these arguments have asserted that slavery was in the main only an affair of the South, with the North developing along a separate, economically independent, and putatively ethically superior path. Others have contended that slavery, as practiced in the American South, wasn’t truly capitalist at all. They have argued, furthermore, that the South was fundamentally backward compared with the North and that slavery was no boon; if anything, in fact, according to this formerly prevalent view, it was a drag on the country’s development. For these reasons and others, it has sometimes been argued that slavery all along was doomed to failure. In fact, Indian removal, the relocation of Black slaves from the Old South, and the establishment of new plantations in the cottonlands of the Mississippi Valley and nearby regions were all avidly financed by Wall Street and other northeastern financiers, who earned enormous profits in the proc...