“Born in Blackness” is laced with arresting nuggets. It was news to me that the trade of colonial North America was overwhelmingly directed toward the Caribbean, “the boiler room of the North Atlantic economy.” In the late 18th century, white Jamaicans enjoyed an annual income 35 times that of British North Americans. French notes that more slaves were trafficked to Martinique, less than one-quarter the size of Long Island, than to the entire United States, while the French so prized tiny Guadeloupe that they swapped it for the whole of French Canada. The evidence that Africans made the New World economically viable is overwhelming... French repeatedly circles back over his material like a picture restorer revealing a lost world as he calmly insists that we rewrite history. I found the book to be searing, humbling and essential reading. ~ NYT Book Review

The way we think about history is entirely wrong, says Howard W French at the start of this magnificent, powerful and absorbing book. The problem is not just that the people and cultures of Africa have been ignored and left to one side; rather, that they have been so miscast that the story of the global past has become part of a profound “mistelling”...

French writes with the elegance you would expect from a distinguished foreign correspondent, and with the passion of someone deeply committed to providing a corrective... This is not a comfortable or comforting read, but it is beautifully done; a masterpiece even. ~ The Guardian

 

Recently Published Essays

China’s Engagement With Africa Has a Cold War Parallel

by Howard W. French – Jan.19, 2021 World Politics Review

Nazarbayev’s Fate in Kazakhstan Is a Cautionary Tale for Putin and Xi

by Howard W. French – Jan.12, 2022 World Politics Review

France’s Troubles in West Africa Go Well Beyond a Failed Counter-Insurgency

by Howard W. French – Jan.05, 2021 World Politics Review

 
 

Advance Praise

Born in Blackness:

Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War

“What happens if we put Africa and Africans into the center of our thinking about the origins of the modern world? In this powerful account of six centuries of global history, Howard W. French takes us on a journey that effectively undermines many of the almost mythical narratives that we have been taught about the sources of Europe’s strength, wealth and modernity. Pushing back against a prevailing current of purposeful forgetting, French shows that Europe’s ‘Great Divergence’ would have been unimaginable without Africans; their wealth, capital and labor played an important role in powering the emerging global economy. To understand the world we live in today, this book is a must-read.” Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton: A Global History

"Howard French's Born in Blackness is a vitally important re-telling of a story from which Africa and Africans have long been wilfully excluded: it renders visible their role as leading actors in the making of modernity. This is essential reading for anyone with an interest in world history."Amitav Ghosh - author of Sea of Poppies

“Born in Blackness charges into the roiling debates about how modernity began, with a powerfully argued case for placing Africa and Africans at the heart of the process, giving voice to a silenced history.”Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity

“Born in Blackness is a brilliant reworking of the conventional wisdom about the rise of the Modern World. This deeply researched and elegantly written book rewinds the tape past Christopher Columbus, and shows how the tragic relationship between Africa and Europe, which began in the 15th century, created modernity as we know it.” Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

“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

“Born in Blackness does for traditional Eurocentric history what Copernicus did for the pieties of his time when he showed that the Earth revolved around the Sun and not vice versa. Africa, its peoples, and its wealth, the superbly qualified Howard French shows us, are far more central to the formation of the modern world than we usually think. And, unlike Copernicus, French has been to all the places he writes about.”Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost: A story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“Born in Blackness is an urgent, searching and imaginative retelling of the decisive role of Africa and Africans in shaping world history. 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.”Toby Green, author of A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution

“With this powerful retelling of global history, Howard W. French challenges us to discard long-accepted mythologies that have obscured to foundations of our contemporary world. Through a riveting account of the centrality of Africa and Africans in shaping economic systems and political thought, he offers a capacious and compelling explanation for how this world came to be. Born in Blackness offers us a new understanding of our common history, and reminds us that confronting that past is precondition for the construction of a different future.”Laurent Dubois, author of Haiti: The Aftershocks of History

 
 
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