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

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He gives readers a new perspective on the African continent as well as a new perspective on this continent. Traditional accounts of the making of the modern world afford a place of primacy to European history. Over the years, although revolts were always successfully defeated, thousands of slaves did flee bondage.

BORN IN BLACKNESS | Kirkus Reviews BORN IN BLACKNESS | Kirkus Reviews

Eric Williams, in a 1938 dissertation at Oxford, pretty convincingly demonstrates that, as French summarizes, "that plantation colonies, slave labor, the trade in slaves, [and] the sugar plantation-complex" were the real driving forces behind industrialization in Britain and the rise of the modern West (153-155).French also argues against the idea that labor by enslaved people from Africa made only a marginal contribution to the rise of the West. The Emperor of Mali and quite possibly the richest person who ever lived, Mansā Mūsā made major international news when he entered Cairo with an entourage of sixty thousand people, countless horses and camels, royal banners, and more gold than the world had ever seen (some estimates, French reports, suggest as much as eighteen tons). French covers a huge amount of ground with style, asking vital new questions and foregrounding the role of Africans in creating―and fighting for―the world of democratic freedoms which is now taken for granted.

Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Book Review: Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the

It’s also not a work of history, as I don’t think it used any primary sources, but was instead a survey of historians’ works about the slave trade.Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. The improperly explained rationale for this era was that European civilisations wanted to form trading ties with Asia.

This book changed how I see Africa’s past | Bill Gates

The principal thesis of Born in Blackness is that the slave trade that flourished from about 1450 to 1850, not the “discovery” of the Americas, was the engine of change. In fact, French reveals, the first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not–as we are so often told, even today–Europe’s yearning for ties with Asia, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge a trade in gold with legendarily rich Black societies sequestered away in the heart of West Africa. And far from being anecdotal to the wealth and power generated by Europe’s colonies in the Americas, Africans were the irreplaceable producers of it. Some historians have estimated, nonetheless, that as many Africans may have perished in these ways as survived the transatlantic passage. million to the New World and another 6 million to the Middle East or directly northward to Europe—but those numbers represent only a portion of the demographic damage.The Seven Years war, where traditional narratives focus on either the European or the North American theaters, had a significant Caribbean component, with Britain seeking to take over Caribbean colonies from both Spain and France. Brief Summary of Book: Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War by Howard W. In fact, in 1762, Britain mobilized over 230 ships and 26,000 soldiers to take Cuba from Spain, losing more men than it did during the entire Seven Years War in North America. 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. 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.