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

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

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

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One of the great books that helps you think about the world in an entirely new way (whilst being horrified that you'd never learned these things before). From 1979 to 1986, he lived in West Africa, where he worked as a translator, taught English literature at the University of Ivory Coast, and lived as a freelance reporter.

A History of Modernity That Puts Africa at Center Stage

Planters on the island bought slaves in increasing numbers with money “raised from willing creditors in England against future deliveries of sugar.” A Barbadian decree in 1636 laid down that slaves would remain in bondage for life, offering the template for servitude throughout the hemisphere. Barbados, says Mr. French, was not merely “a pioneer in the development of chattel slavery”; it became “an enormously powerful driver of history” through the “prodigious wealth” it would generate. In 1600, Brazil had supplied nearly all of Western Europe’s sugar; by 1700, thanks to disruptions in Brazil caused by Dutch-Portuguese warring, Barbados alone supplied half of Europe’s sugar fix. French also argues against the idea that labor by enslaved people from Africa made only a marginal contribution to the rise of the West. For example, he writes, “The value derived from the trade and ownership of slaves in America alone [was] greater than that of all of the country’s factories, railroads, and canals combined.” And more generally: “Without Africa, and the slave plantation agriculture of the Caribbean that derived from it, there would never have been the kind of explosion of wealth that the West enjoyed … nor such early or rapid industrialization.” As the expenses underpinning the thirst for gold mounted, says Mr. French, other sources of income had to be found. “Framed at its simplest,” he writes, gold led the Portuguese to the trade in slaves. And it was slaves who enabled the flourishing of a lucrative new commodity—sugar—which “drove the birth of a truly global capitalist economy.” This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed byThe book’s main aim, French explains early on, is to restore those key chapters which articulate Africa’s significance to our common narrative of modernity to their proper place of prominence.

Born in Blackness’ Review: Slavery and Capital at - AEI ‘Born in Blackness’ Review: Slavery and Capital at - AEI

Professor Howard W. Frenchis Professor of Journalism at Columbia University in New York City, global affairs writer, and the author of five books, including three works of non-fiction, and a work of documentary photography.These experiences, mainly dating to the 1400s, were to prove instrumental not only in the settling of the Americas and the opening up of new trade routes to Europe. As it turned out, the most important consequences were for the people of Africa. The scale of human suffering that followed Columbus’s crossing of the Atlantic is almost impossible to conceive, let alone describe: modern consensus is that around 12 million were put on slave ships in appalling conditions. By the late 1600s the sugar trade was a driver of the economy in England (197). Probably more accurate to see the sugar mills, rather than the put-out textile system in England, as the place where farm and factory first met, capitalist forms of corporations and investment by disparate people unknown to one another, and coordination of highly synchronized activities first took place (206). Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad, edited by Robert Kimbrough, Third Edition, Norton Critical Edition, W.W. Norton, 1988, pp. 251–262. Please report metadata errors at the source library. If there are multiple source libraries, know that we pull metadata from top to bottom, so the first one might be sufficient. He writes: “The gigantic boost that [this gold] provided the [Portuguese] crown … made it possible for Lisbon to keep pace with Spain in their headlong course into ocean faring, discovery, conquest, crusading, and intercontinental trade.”



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