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

by Howard W. French

Daniel Defoe, the English author of Robinson Crusoe, but also a trader, pamphleteer, and spy, bested them both when he wrote: “No African trade, no negroes; no negroes, no sugars, gingers, indicoes etc.; no sugar etc no islands no continent, no continent, no trade.” Postlethwayt, Raynal, and Defoe were surely right, even if they were far from comprehending all of the reasons why. As this book will make clear, more than any other part of the world, Africa has been the linchpin of the machine of modernity. Without African peoples trafficked from its shores, the Americas would have counted for little in the ascendance of the West. African labor, in the form of slaves, became the providential factor that made the very mise en valeur or development of the Americas possible. Without it, Europe’s colonial projects in the New World, such as we know them, are simply unimaginable.