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

by Howard W. French

Spain and Portugal waged fierce naval battles in West Africa over access to gold. Holland and Portugal, then unified with Spain, fought something little short of a world war in the seventeenth century, with control of trade in the richest sources of slaves in Africa, present-day Congo and Angola, flipping back and forth between them. On the far side of the Atlantic, Brazil, the biggest producer of slave-grown sugar in the early seventeenth century, was caught up in this same struggle, and repeatedly changed hands. Later in that same century, England fought Spain over control of the Caribbean. Why did faraway powers contend so fiercely over such things? Tiny Barbados provides an answer. By the mid-1660s, just three decades or so after England initiated an African slave-labor model for its plantations there—one that was first implemented in the Portuguese colony of São Tomé little more than a century earlier—sugar from Barbados was worth more than the metal exports of all of Spanish America.