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

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Lauren van der Rede receives funding from the Early Career Academic Development programme of the Division of Research Development, Stellenbosch University. Partners 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. The 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. This book provided me with a clearer insight into the evolution of the Atlantic slave trade. It traces the progression of primary commodities — starting with gold, then transitioning to sugar, and finally to cotton — that acted as catalysts for the spread of slavery. While this progression is eloquently presented, what truly astounded me was the immense demand for sugar and the lengths nations would go to secure its substantial profits.

Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the

This book is filled with countless eyeopeners… All history is, by definition, revisionist. In connecting the various dots, French is inviting us to reconsider what we understand about how we got here.... Painful and necessary… [an] infuriating and hugely enlightening book." Financial Times - Dele Olojede 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.”

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. 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. MD5 of a better version of this file (if applicable). Fill this in if there is another file that closely matches this file (same edition, same file extension if you can find one), which people should use instead of this file. If you know of a better version of this file outside of Anna’s Archive, then please upload it. 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).

A History of Modernity That Puts Africa at Center Stage

Support authors: If you like this and can afford it, consider buying the original, or supporting the authors directly. 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. From the Samuel Johnson Prize-winning author of China After Mao , a sweeping and timely study of twentieth-century dictators and the development of the modern cult of personality. This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed byThese 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.