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.”

Born in Blackness by Howard W. French | Waterstones

A necessary book. A compelling narrative that systematically dismantles one prop after another in the academy’s master narrative of how Europe brought light to ’the Dark Continent’ over the past six centuries. A worthy successor to Du Bois’ The World and Africa.” ―Mahmood Mamdani, author of Neither Settler Nor Native 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. It’s difficult to grasp today just how large a role sugar—and the slaves who farmed it—played in the Atlantic economy. “By 1660 it is estimated that tiny Barbados’s sugar production alone was worth more than the combined exports of all of Spain’s New World colonies.” This included the prodigious output of silver from Spain’s silver mountain in Potosí, Bolivia, and its mines in northern Mexico. “And this was just for starters. From 1650 to 1800, as major new sugar islands came on line in the Caribbean, sugar consumption in Britain would increase 2500 percent, and over this time, the market value of sugar would consistently exceed the value of all other commodities combined.”

A world born in Blackness

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance. 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. In the 18th century, Haiti was the richest colony in history. And when its slave population successfully rebelled against the French and defeated huge armies sent by the French, British, and Spanish in the succeeding years, “Haiti rivaled the United States in terms of its influence on the world, notably in helping fulfill the most fundamental Enlightenment value of all, ending slavery.” And the impact on the size and shape of the United States was also profound. Specialists aside,” French writes, “few imagine that islands like Barbados and Jamaica were far more important in their day than were the English colonies that would become the United States.” The two islands produced substantially more wealth for Britain than all 13 colonies taken as whole. The riches that underwrote the expansion of the British Empire flowed not from North America but from the Caribbean—and it was wealth on a scale that few had dreamed possible. The North American colonies played only a peripheral role in this commerce—as merchants. The farmers, fishermen, and tradesmen centered on Boston, Philadelphia, and New York supplied food to the islands and clothed the slaves, themselves growing prosperous in the process.

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

French points out that early European exploration and colonization were highly focused on trying to get access to sources of wealth from central Africa, first in the form of gold, which had always been a source for European specie (49-50), and later in the form of enslaved humans. 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. Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.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.” I also wish that when we talk about the evils of white settler colonialism, we would understand how much the genocide against indigenous peoples here inspired these devilish colonizers. How many of us connect the French colonization of Algeria to the American model, for example?