Born in Blackness Quotes

“as many as six hundred of the Jewish newcomers perished soon after their arrival on the island. The remainder, however, would form an important constituent of an entirely new and important social hybrid that emerged as a by-product of Portuguese-African contact in the early crucibles of the trade in gold and slaves: Creole culture.*”
― Howard W. French, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War

“By 1636, civil authorities on the island decreed a rule that became common in chattel systems throughout the hemisphere: slaves would remain in bondage for life. In 1661, with the island now amid a full-blown sugar boom, the authorities formulated a fuller set of laws governing the lives of slaves, a Black code that one historian has called “one of the most influential pieces of legislation passed by a colonial legislature.” Antigua, Jamaica, South Carolina, and, “indirectly,” Georgia adopted it in its entirety, while the laws of many other English colonies were modeled after it. The law described Africans as a “heathenish, brutish and uncertaine, dangerous kinde of people,” and gave their white owners near total control over their lives. The right of trial by jury guaranteed for whites was excluded for slaves, whom their owners could punish at will, facing no consequences even for murder, so long as they could cite a cause. Other rules barred Black slaves from skilled occupations, thus helping to reify race as a largely impermeable membrane dividing whites and Blacks in the New World. With steps like these, tiny Barbados became an enormously powerful driver of history, not only through the prodigious wealth it would generate, a wealth hitherto “unknown in other parts of colonial America,” but by its legal and social example as well. The island colony stood out as a pioneer in the development of chattel slavery and in the construction of the plantation machine, as the originator of codes like these, and later as a crucial source of early migration, both Black and white, to the Carolinas, Virginia, and later Jamaica. Here was the seed crystal of the English plantation system in the New World, or in the words of one historian, its “cultural hearth.”
― Howard W. French, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War

“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.”
― Howard W. French, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War

“The first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not Europe’s yearning for ties with Asia, as so many of us have been taught in grade school, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge trading ties with legendarily rich Black societies hidden away somewhere in the heart of “darkest” West Africa.”
― Howard W. French, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War

“Notoriously, during the Nazi conquest of Eastern Europe, Hitler equated ‘indigenous inhabitants’ with ‘Indians’ and declared “the Volga must be our Mississippi.”
― Howard W. French, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War

“with the pleasant and easy life”
― Howard W. French, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War