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

by Howard W. French

By the late 1930s, France had a mere 385 colonial administrators commanding the destinies of 15 million African subjects. British Africa, with 43 million people, had a roughly comparable 1,200. By the late 1950s, the dawn of the independence era for the continent, out of a population of 200 million sub-Saharan Africans, European stewardship had produced only 8,000 secondary school graduates, half of whom were from just two colonies, Britain’s Ghana and Nigeria. In France’s territories only about a third of school-aged children received any primary education at all.

Europe’s direct colonial tutelage neither began nor ended everywhere in Africa at the same time, but can be said to have roughly lasted from 1885 until the early 1960s. Outside of South Africa, it was not until after World War II, however, that infrastructure investments of any scale were finally undertaken. The few railways that were built were mostly small-gauge roads and focused on moving untransformed minerals from mine to port. One searches in vain for rail lines or highways connecting the colonies to one another. Seen in the light of the short duration and tenuous nature of European colonial commitments to Africa, it is little wonder that much of the continent has had a politically tumultuous and economically unfulfilling experience of post-independence development.

Establishing reliable numbers for the deaths that occurred during slaving-related warfare, capture, and especially the trek from the interior to the coast from slave-trading regions is probably an impossible task. Some historians have estimated, nonetheless, that as many Africans may have perished in these ways as survived the transatlantic passage. Taking into account the numbers of Africans who died aboard the floating tombs that ferried them across the Atlantic, perhaps as few as 42 percent of the people ensnared into the trade survived long enough to undergo sale in the New World. The historian Joseph Miller has estimated that on top of this horrendous toll, by the end of the three- to four-year “seasoning” period that slaves underwent after their arrival in Brazil (and in other plantation societies), perhaps only twenty-eight to thirty out of every hundred people taken captive in Africa were still alive.* Even though this represented an overall “wastage” rate of human life in the order of two-thirds, for decade after decade, the Portuguese and other major traders treated horrific losses like these as a morally unremarkable cost of “doing business.”

For most of its pre-modern history, Africa was seriously underpopulated in comparison with either Europe or Asia. This was due to the strong influence of exceptionally high disease burdens in tropical Africa in suppressing fertility and exacerbating infant mortality, and hence population growth.

If the outflow of Africans that began in the late Middle Ages and peaked between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries represented a radical break with the continent’s past, the belated but dramatic rebound in African population growth that began during the interwar years of the twentieth century can be seen as another radical break—this time, though, not merely for Africa, but for all of humankind. The population of Africa, which in all of its history had never been known to undergo rapid sustained growth, increased by about 600 percent in the twentieth century, rising from perhaps 130 million people to 1 billion in one hundred years. Although this surpasses the pace of population growth ever previously seen on any continent in human history, most if not all of this growth should be understood as a kind of recovery or rebound from the depredations of the past. Africa’s twentieth-century population boom, however, came too late to position it well for competition with Europe, North America, and other global centers of wealth and power. That is because the foundations of the ascension of these regions had already been laid a century or more earlier, as the world became tightly stitched together via maritime transport and trade, helping ensure the North Atlantic countries a much more favorable position in an era of highly globalized economies.

trust in institutions and in authority itself was badly undermined: “because chiefs often were slave traders, or were forced to sell their own people into slavery, the slave trade may have engendered mistrust of political figures, particularly local leaders.”

What did it mean for the French-held third of Hispaniola to become the richest colony ever? It has been estimated that between 1716 and 1787, a period that covers France’s greatest boom years in the eighteenth century, fully 15 percent of its economic growth derived from its Caribbean empire. No fewer than a million of the French king’s subjects depended directly on the colonial trade for their livelihoods. Saint Domingue alone generated as much trade as the entire United States. The immense profits generated by the plantation societies Britain and France controlled in the West Indies helped power both their economies into the industrial era.

Napoleon, whose reputation as a military genius is matched by few in the modern era, is equally famous for his defeat in his Russian campaign of 1812. It is seen not only as a monumental miscalculation but as a textbook example of hubris. Believing that Black people—who had already won their liberty once, and successfully defended it against the other two greatest empires in Europe, Britain and Spain—could be brutalized and bullied back into slavery by a power situated on the far side of the Atlantic, though, was a folly of similar order as marching an army to Moscow to fight in the winter. And the price that the French emperor paid for it was enormous. More than 50,000 French died trying to set the clock back on freedom, including eighteen generals. As one historian wrote, “Napoleon suffered more casualties in St. Domingue than he would at Waterloo.”

Without the blues and jazz, each in its own separate way original fruits of the cotton plant, it is hard to imagine much else in American popular culture, and certainly not in its music, that was so fully distinguishable from the traditions of Europe or that so powerfully stamped its style upon the world. W. E. B. Du Bois spoke of these unique musical traditions as one might of the sap that oozes from an aromatic tree; they flowed, he said, from the American slave experience as an “anointing chrism,” and constituted “the only gift of pure art in America.” The music critic Ted Gioia put this thought in a different way. “The influence of the Delta on the sound of our musical lives is so pervasive today that it is almost impossible to take full measure of its impact. One might as well try to imagine cooking without herbs and spices, or medicine before the arrival of penicillin.”

WHEN WE THINK ABOUT New World slavery, we tend to think of it as only a matter of the planting and harvesting of crops. From tobacco and rice to cotton, the early American economic model was so thoroughly built on the proliferation of plantations that this is perhaps inevitable. But while not altogether wrong, the picture we sustain of the creation of prosperity in mainland North America is woefully incomplete. Before it was taken over by ethnically European settlers, the Mississippi River Valley that native peoples once treasured as their home consisted in large parts of heavily forested wilderness, full of immense cypress, gum, and ash trees, replete with cougars and bears, and of extensive swamplands and incredibly dense vines, all of which needed to be cleared before this conquered earth could be put to any Western-style productive use. Although nowadays largely forgotten, this, too, was the work of Black slaves. Traveling with slave drivers in flatboats, sometimes in chains and carrying their own crude tools, they had to fell enormous expanses of woodlands, drain wetlands, saw wood, construct houses, build fences, and dress fields. Without all of this labor, in which many tens of thousands of slaves were worked to exhaustion and early death, the farming itself would have scarcely been possible.

in the fifty years before the Civil War, roughly a million slaves would be marched or shipped out of the Upper South by sea, roughly twice the number of Blacks who had been landed in British North America from Africa. We are talking here about a migration—or, more accurately, a mass deportation—that ensnared more Black people than the number of whites who undertook the wagon train settlement of the American West, the fodder of so much Hollywood legend in the twentieth century. It was bigger, too, than the emigration of Jews from Russia and eastern Europe in the nineteenth century. And yet who learns about this in any detail today in school?

By the time the Stovalls had acquired their plantation, the toil of slaves supplied through methods like these had already made the deep topsoil of the Delta the most valuable farmland on earth. Such rich, black earth had produced a torrent of wealth that vastly exceeded even the enormous fortunes created for France by Saint Domingue, and it had more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the United States to show for it. The numbers, however true, still strain credulity. In 1790, American cotton production hovered somewhere around 1.5 million pounds. By 1800, it had risen to 36.5 million pounds. In 1820, annual production stood at 167.5 million pounds. And by the eve of the American Civil War, the output of cotton, expanding geographically but still concentrated in the Mississippi River Valley, was nearing an astounding 2 billion pounds annually. In the comparison of the historian Sven Beckert, cotton became to the nineteenth-century United States what oil was to Saudi Arabia in the twentieth, making it the richest and most successful slave society in history. As American output soared, it established itself firmly as the world’s most valuable commodity. On a per capita basis, this made residents of the South wealthier than the people of any European country other than England.

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...

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.’”

It is beyond dispute that cotton production took off in the 1790s in the American South, and that the Whitney gin played a not inconsiderable role. By one estimate, prime land used to grow cotton quickly tripled in value after its adoption. What else, then, is missing from this story? Processing technology was not the only bottleneck restricting cotton production in this era, nor was it even the most important one. As we have seen, cotton output grew massively over the next decade or so, reaching 36 million pounds by the turn of the nineteenth century. More than the new gin, to which most of the credit is attributed, the increase in cotton production was due to a series of developments involving slaves.

In 1801, 28 pounds per day, per picker, was the average from several South Carolina labor camps. By 1818, enslaved people on James Magruder’s Mississippi labor camp picked between 50 and 80 pounds per day. A decade later, in Alabama, the totals on one plantation ranged up to 132 pounds, and by the 1840s, on a Mississippi labor camp, the hands averaged 341 pounds each on a good day—“the largest that I have ever heard of,” the overseer wrote. In the next decade, averages climbed higher still.

Resolute in their desire for freedom, the Haitians were equally instrumental in placing America on the path to great powerhood in the nineteenth century. More than any other single event that has happened in the country’s entire history, in fact, Saint Domingue’s self-liberating slaves formed and shaped the continent-size America we know on the map today.

From the very start, the twin menaces of Indian resistance and Black revolt, conjoined with the promise of an expanding white frontier, were strategic essential ingredients in the mortar used to bind the young nation together.

fear of a British-Black axis was so real that just as the British assault on Washington, D.C., during the War of 1812 commenced, unfounded rumors of a slave revolt caused members of the American militia to flee the capital and surrounding counties in Maryland and Virginia. This opened the way for British troops to take the undefended city, scarcely firing a shot.

many Blacks had rightfully come to believe deeply that America was their country at least as much as anyone else’s, and to reject altogether this idea that the solution to America’s crisis of race was for them to find another home. One Black abolitionist, David Walker, whose urgent 1829 publication, Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, has been compared with Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, spoke of African Americans as the “chosen people” through whose struggles alone could America’s ideals be fully realized.

Then and now, people in the North have obtained tremendous moral satisfaction for their region’s role in fighting and dying to end slavery. But like Britain, where ending slavery has been woven into the very core of the national legend, conveniently overshadowing the fact that that nation was the superpower of Atlantic slavery for two centuries, the moral story of the American experience is a largely mythologized one. To anyone who has cared to really look, there is no escaping the fact that Black bondage benefited the North as much as the South, albeit in very different ways. When the rupture between the country’s two “sections” finally came, W. E. B. Du Bois explained the conflict in these terms: The South was fighting to take slavery out of the Union, and the North fighting to keep it in the Union; the South fighting to get it beyond the limits of the United States Constitution, and the North fighting for the old guarantees;—both despising the Negro, both insulting the Negro.

Blacks have played a leading role in supplying energy, creativity, and moral urgency to the American project from the very outset. It has been their struggle, more than any other, that has cemented the association of the idea that Americans sustain of themselves—and of their country—with the fundamental value of universal freedom.

The great English historian Eric Hobsbawm once described industrialization as the greatest event in the history of humankind. The story of slavery, of plantations, and of the Black labor that generated the most important product of that era, cotton, is by any reasonable standard a core element in this immense human change. But that is not all: the economic activity that surrounded cotton also lifted banking and insurance and drove globalized commerce on scales never seen before. It profoundly reshaped the political maps of continents. It positioned the United States to become the world’s largest and most dynamic economic power already by the late nineteenth century. And it helped propel the new American colossus to swiftly attain twice the size of Britain’s economy by 1914.