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

by Howard W. French

Of central concern in the following pages is the deeply twinned and tragic history of Africa and Europe that began with geopolitical collisions in the fifteenth century. Events and activities that flowed from Afro-European encounters set the most Atlantic-oriented Europeans onto a path that would eventually propel their continent past the great civilizational centers of Asia and the Islamic world in both wealth and power. This ascension was not founded upon any innate or permanent European characteristics that produced superiority. To a degree that remains unrecognized, it was built on the foundation of Europe’s economic and political relations with Africa. The heart of the matter here, of course, was the massive, centuries-long transatlantic trade in slaves who were put to work by the millions growing sugar, tobacco, cotton, and other cash crops on the plantations of the New World.