Colonial Myth, Reality & Modernity

Robert Connell

Born in Blackness:
Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World,
1471 to the Second World War
By Howard W. French
W.W. Norton (Liveright), 544 pages, 2021 hardback, 2024, paperback $19.95.

HOWARD W. FRENCH’S Born in Blackness provides a sprawling, 500-page account of the fateful engagement between Europe and “Sub-Saharan”(1) Africa, laying out the argument that their twinned and tragic history set the foundations for the modern age. (3)

French constructs the main narrative arc of the story by recounting a broad sample of the historical scholarship on this multifaceted subject, threaded through with the experiences and insights of his own travels across the Atlantic World, often personally visiting the sites most prominently featured in the book.

The narration keeps an active pace and, relatively free from the conventions of purely academic historical writing, is able to walk the reader through an otherwise labyrinthine story with an elegant focus that avoids becoming too bogged down with data and minutiae.

Nonetheless, the vastness of the subject matter covered in the book is such that this review will focus mainly on elaborating the political economic dimensions of French’s analysis. I choose this emphasis because, while marketed as a history of the African diaspora and Atlantic World, Born in Blackness is as much a history of labor, both challenging and extending traditional Marxist views on the origins of the working class by centering the indispensable role of enslaved workers in the rise of capitalism and the empires that fostered it.(2)

Thus, in offering an implicitly historical materialist view of the intersections of slavery and capitalism, French follows through on historian Stephanie Smallwood’s prescient imperative to “put the enslaved human herself at the center of our analysis of the commodity form.”(3)

Colonial Narratives

Ultimately, the book incites its readers to reconsider dominant narratives and much received wisdom about how the last 600 years unfolded via the supposed advances of Europe and marginality of Africa in the Atlantic World.

Classroom lessons and traditional studies on the subject usually present this history as variations of the following tropes: beginning in the late 15th century, European sea­farers, harnessing the most advanced nautical technology of the time while possessing a spirit of creativity and initiative unique to their cultures, launched an era of exploration exemplified by Christopher Columbus’ “discovery” of the New World. (1-2)

Going from victory to victory, the conquistadores forged vast empires on the backs of the invariably primitive societies they encountered, all of whom were awed and cowed by the overwhelming superiority of European commodities and armaments.

From the vantage of empire, Europe would further expand its global lead in thought and ingenuity, so we are told, inevitably paving the way for the industrial revolution. If Africa is mentioned at all in such narratives, it is usually only discussed as a source of slaves and/or a mere stepping stone in the Portuguese quest to reach India, the supposed prime objective of European exploration.

French’s book exposes such hagiographies for the myths that they are, and in so doing stands as an important review of more recent and emerging scholarship that re-center Africans and their diasporic descendants as indispensable and decisive actors in the rise of European hegemony.

This book is all the more timely given the unfortunate persistence of the flawed and still-prevailing colonial historical narrative. Popular historical consciousness still understands pre-colonial West, Central and Southern Africa as isolated places devoid of history before sustained contact with Europeans. (70)

Indeed, this was a long-held consensus among Western academics that continues to have strong influence today; certain public intellectuals, echoing the discourse of “civilizing missions” and the “White Man’s Burden,” still argue that colonialism benefited the continent despite any regrettable violence entailed.(4)

Africa’s Global Influence

It is fitting then that French begins his expansive historical narrative in a medieval West African polity that was greatly influential across three continents, the Mali Empire.

Mansa Musa, King of Mali during the height of its power in the early 14th century, is well known for his epic sojourn in Cairo and pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324. Sitting atop some of the largest known gold deposits in the world at the time, the immense wealth of Mali allowed Mansa Musa to expend and gift so much gold on his journey that he singlehandedly caused the price of the metal to plummet in the Middle East. (30)

Mansu Musa’s otherworldly largesse cemented his legacy as perhaps the wealthiest person in history. Word spread fast, and news of the existence of an empire with immeasurable riches electrified European royal courts, who were themselves emerging from multiple disastrous crises.

Prime among these was the Black Death pandemic, which in the 13th century had killed between one-third and three-fifths of the population of Western Europe. This depopulation event contributed to a dramatic loss of output in local silver mines which, combined with the loss of access to gold normally acquired from North African traders, created a severe balance of payment crisis for European feudal regimes. (50)

It is little wonder that European monarchs saw opening direct trade relations with a land of fabled wealth as the solution to their problems. As it turned out, it would be the Iberian powers of Portugal and Spain most well-placed to make good on this dream, with their adaptation of Arabian sailing technology and cartography allowing for trans-oceanic travel.

Even here, the Europeans did not have a distinct advantage or insight that gave them an inevitable edge over any other societies at the time. French notes that Chinese Ming Dynasty expeditions under Admiral Zheng He, Malay explorers of the Indian Ocean, and indigenous navigators of the South Pacific had already accomplished marvelous feats of discovery by the time the Iberians began to sail down the west coast of Africa in the 15th century. (37-38)

In fact, French recounts the intriguing possibility that, a century and half before Columbus, Mansa Musa’s own predecessor may have perished leading a Malian fleet attempting to cross the Atlantic in search of new trade opportunities. The failure of this endeavor possibly sparked Mansa Musa’s own famous overland travel to the Arab world as another means of establishing new trade routes and alliances.

The point here is that medieval states invariably had a desire to secure and expand lucrative trade routes for scarce commodities and resources. French persuasively argues that it was the desperation for West African gold that sparked and motivated the Iberian “Age of Discovery,” rather than the popular myth that reaching Asia was always the main objective. (38-39)

By the time the Portuguese finally reached what they would call the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) in 1471, the Mali Empire was in decline, but the Europeans still had to deal with the local kingdoms as equals and even with supplication.

Despite finally finding the proverbial “River of Gold,” almost nothing the Portuguese brought to trade was new to West Africa, and at best they would make their profits filling local shortages in African manufacturing capacities and raw materials.(75)

French thus also debunks another myth of European superiority in the early days of Atlantic exploration: that Europeans had overwhelmingly superior or irresistible trade goods. As such, returns of gold fell short of Portuguese expectations, although the windfall was still transformative for the Portuguese economy with additional knock-on effects across Europe.

Furthermore, during this period Portugal succeeded in beating their Spanish rivals in a military struggle for monopoly over gold and trade in West Africa, a defeat that French argues spurred the Spanish to later support Columbus’ mission as an attempt to make up for the loss of access to African wealth. (81-82)

From Gold to Plantation Slavery

A major pivot for Portuguese dealings in Africa, and indeed the development of European imperialism as a whole, was the 1482 founding of the Elmina (“the mine”) fortress on the coast of present-day Ghana. (79-80)

Although most infamous as a major embarkation point for enslaved captives during the transatlantic slave trade — now standing as a museum and memorial site that includes the “Door of No Return” through which the captives passed on their way to slave ships anchored offshore — the etymology of the castle’s name reveals its original purpose as a conduit for African gold.

At last, with a permanent outpost in on the West African coastline, the Portuguese would be able to accumulate and ship gold in much greater quantities and frequencies, fulfilling their dream of becoming among the wealthiest societies in Europe. This, in turn, would lay the foundation for another economic revolution, the mass production of sugar using enslaved labor:

“Framed at its simplest, gold had led the Portuguese to slaves, and slaves drove the expansion of a lucrative new industry, sugar, which would transform the world like few products have in history, and in doing so would also produce one of history’s greatest human tolls.” (66)

The human cost of slavery, the implication of both European and African elites in its expansion, and the still-unfolding social and ideological repercussions of this most dehumanizing form of subjection are increasingly being addressed in a growing corpus of academic literature. Here, French excels at incorporating into his narrative the latest research and scholarly debates therein.

In particular, French recounts the oft-ignored chain of events that saw 15th century Iberian experiments in sugar cane production in Madeira and the Canary Islands, worked by captives directly kidnapped from the shores of West Africa, metastasize into the foundation of a new mode of production that would accelerate European economic integration and lift the entire continent out of its long, medieval stagnation.

It was in this period that Elmina, sitting astride the Gulf of Guinea as the main entrepot of gold flowing into Europe, would become the catalyst of the Atlantic slave trade in the mid-16th century.

French’s central argument in describing this world-historic pivot is that the development of the racial order that would influence the socio-economic structure of every New World colony is as much a story of São Tomé as it is Elmina. It was in this small, 330-square mile island in the Bight of Biafra at the eastern boundaries of the Gulf of Guinea where the plantation model of enslavement would reach its final, terrible form. (122)

In São Tomé, at the dawn of the 16th century, the Portuguese would systematize the basic organizational structure, inputs and logistical requirements for the mass production of sugar as a global commodity, a production chain experienced by the enslaved as an unremitting regime of kidnapping, terror and brutality.

The ethical abyss into which European societies plunged themselves for the pursuit of profit is laid bare, but the economic impact was similarly consequential. In the plantation system, larger concentrations of workers were used for the production and processing of sugar than any analogous endeavor in Europe up until that point. (116)(5)

Similarly unprecedented were the highly specialized roles and the intensive and regimented division of labor of the plantations, which were usually under the control of private enterprises.

The planting, harvesting, pressing, boiling and further refinement of sugar cane is highly time-sensitive and requires the efficient synchronization of labor and inputs necessitating a vertically-integrated commodity production chain that anticipated Taylorism and the modern assembly line. (206)

Foundations of Industry and Finance

Slavery was critical to plantation agriculture — and the world economy. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/deed.en)

The multiplier effects of the plantation sugar industry, that is, spinoffs and ancillary businesses, gave rise to entirely new economic sectors and, as a newly affordable commodity available to all, laid the foundation for mass consumerism with profound consequences for European trade, labor productivity, leisure and health. (167)

Later in the history of slavery, the age of “Big Cotton” in the American antebellum period would similarly lay the foundations for global finance capitalism and modern business management. (393, 409-10)

French thus builds his case that the origins of both modern capitalism and industrialization are found in these proto-factories predicated on enslaved labor.

Over 200 years before the mechanization of English textile production, French argues, plantation slavery with all its interlocking nodes of globalized trade set the spark for industrial capitalism to emerge in Europe, enabled by both the wealth generated from sugar and the new and novel processes of (forced) labor organization therein.

Yet the historical and political consequences plantation slavery stretched still further. In their drive to purchase more and more enslaved captives to work the sugar plantations of São Tomé, and after 1500 in the new colony of Brazil, the Portuguese changed their diplomatic stance toward West African states.

In what would later become a modus operandi of colonialism the world over, the Portuguese shifted away from the mutually respectful trade relations forced on them by a relatively equal balance of power, and moved to foster divisions and warfare between African polities in order to fuel conflicts that would enslave increasing numbers of Africans, most of whom were prisoners of war.

Furthermore, the 17th century saw increasing competition among European states as the Dutch, English and French, driven by their own imperial ambitions, mounted a long series of wars against Portugal and Spain (which were united between 1580 and 1640 as the Iberian Union).

It was through this prolonged conflict, a quasi-world war, that French argues the modern European state was forged.

The Making of Imperial States

The dominant historical narrative is that, for better or worse, the rulers of European polities created uniquely powerful states that gradually became more capable than any of their peers and rivals, thus allowing European empires to subjugate much of the world in the modern era.

While not denying this simple historical fact, French complicates this story by extending sociologist and political scientist Charles Tilly’s maxim that “war makes states,” arguing that the perennial intra-European conflicts and competition for colonies and slaves required the building of more capable states.

Rather than any uniquely-European social ingenuity or political wherewithal, it was the constant military preparation and waging of war that catalyzed the increasing organizational scale and complexity of civil institutions and statecraft.

For the benefit of the state’s extractive power, manpower mobilization and force projection, new social contracts emerged that further expanded a citizen’s duty to their state and vice-versa. As such, empire-building in the Atlantic World was the crucible of the modern European state, not the other way around. The centrality of slavery to this dynamic is evidenced by the immense military and human sacrifices these states would expend in preserving their advantages in the plantation economy and slave trade.(6)

Finally, we arrive at among the most insidious and socially damaging outcomes of European colonial conquest: the racialization of chattel enslavement. In the 1440s, the Portuguese began their first, tepid slave raids on the coastline of newly-explored West Africa in order to feed the labor needs of their new, first-generation, sugar mills in Madeira.

According to French, this was the moment that the black skin color of the captives began to be associated with the supposed barbarity of Africans in European eyes which, combined with medieval Christian religious doctrines justifying the enslavement of “pagans,” provided a juridical rationale for slavery. (69-70)

Although mainstream histories no longer justify slavery, the persistent popular myth of European superiority in the late medieval period continues to cloud and obfuscate the reality of the founding of the slave trade in public discourse.

The idea remains that Africans were somehow “stateless brutes” bereft of the means for collective defense such that, however regrettably, their societies were naturally or inevitably vulnerable to European predation.

The realities on the ground facing the Portuguese belied their own burgeoning racist beliefs: West Africans were, in fact, organized under kingdoms and formal chieftaincies governed by laws that were eminently able to defend themselves from Portuguese slave raiding — not only successfully repelling such attacks, but also imposing standards of conduct on the Portuguese through diplomatic pressure.

In the face of this, Prince Henry the Navigator was forced to halt all slave raiding in 1448. (71) However, many of these same West African polities, long-enmeshed in the Trans-Saharan Arab slave trade, were more than willing to sell slaves to the Portuguese so long as it was on their own terms.

A Racialized System

With the rise of the São Tomé plantation model and its replication in the New World, Black complexion became the common marker of what was an otherwise ethnically-diverse labor force,(7) and thus the most convenient identification of slave status, where one’s own skin automatically betrayed you as a slave and impeded escape. (125-6)

This technique of domination, predicated on the growing exclusivity of West Africa as a source for captive workers, ensured that the process of chattel enslavement at the dawn of modernity in the Atlantic World was firmly racialized.

Here, French is quite correct in identifying the mobilization of human phenotypic difference as an essential part of the confluence of slave labor, global trade, industrial technology and colonial geopolitics that established the plantation system.

However, a discussion of the pre-modern ideological roots of Black subjection is surprisingly lacking from his analysis. The reader is left with the impression that the association of Blackness with servitude emerged specifically from the Portuguese exploration of West Africa. Yet historical research indicates that Europeans adopted Arab attitudes, mobilized within their own slave trade, linking Blackness with servitude.(8)

Furthermore, the racist biblical myth of Noah’s curse of Ham serving as justification for the perpetual enslavement of Black Africans is a trope found in all Abrahamic religions.(9) Finally, the association of the color black with sin and the Devil stretches back into early Christian culture.(10)

As such, in his otherwise expansive historical narrative, French misses an opportunity to articulate how traditional, religiously-bound conceptions of human difference and hierarchy were reproduced as anti-Black racism by the political economic and colonial dynamics of capitalism in its emergent period.

Persistent Resistance

Returning to the unifying idea of the book, that the enslavement of Africans was the very “fulcrum of modernity” (394), the story would not be complete without centering the resistance of Africans and their descendants.

Africans migrating and being moved in chains is a narrative motif that threads through the book. On every step of this path, Africans ceaselessly fought back against their subjugation and enslavement, whether through the activities of their own polities to temper and limit the slave trade, or through personal actions of the enslaved to conduct sabotage or work slowdowns on the plantations, and also escape (marronage), rebellion, and revolution.

French elaborates these through three main examples: the diplomatic and military attempts of the Kingdom of Kongo which, albeit itself complicit in the slave trade, unsuccessfully attempted to restrict Portuguese colonialism in the 16th century; the Haitian Revolution at the turn of the 19th century; and the 1811 German Coast uprising in present-day Louisiana, the largest slave uprising in U.S. history.

In all these cases Africans and/or their creolized descendants demonstrated great capacities for organized leadership, strategic planning, visionary ambition and a keen understanding of their enemies, all the more impressive given the arduous conditions of their struggle. (360-2) Furthermore, the contours of African slave resistance demonstrated a practice of freedom emergent from the Black experience itself. (337-8)

Here, especially given the book’s theme of alternative pathways of history and modernity opened by Black struggle, it would have been greatly beneficial to his analysis had French discussed in more detail some of the new social formations that did emerge on the relatively rare occasions that Africans were successful in their uprisings.

In this respect, the socio-political developments of Maroon societies offer a rich terrain of investigation, of which the Maroon polity (Quilombo) of Palmares in Brazil is among the most consequential.

Organized as a complex, sovereign state on the fringes of the plantations in the present-day Brazilian state of Alagoas, Palmares existed for most of the 17th century as a bastion of freedom for the enslaved who managed to escape their captivity.

Practicing a form of social organization for the collective security of ethnically diverse communities adapted from the former Kingdom of Kongo in present-day Angola, Palmares held out until it was finally destroyed by a Portuguese onslaught in 1694.(11)

Most intriguingly, the population also consisted of indigenous people, Europeans and “poor free immigrants of all racial backgrounds” indicating that, whatever unknowns remain about Palmares, the society provided a life of freedom at least as compelling as the Portuguese Empire, even for people who were already free.(12)

Throughout his book, French demonstrates a comprehensive understanding of the interdependence between the enslavement of Africans, European economic prosperity, the geopolitics of empire, and the foundational role of Portuguese colonialism therein, distilled in the formula “without Angola no slaves, without slaves no sugar, without sugar no Brazil.” (165)

As such, it is a noted absence from his analysis of slave resistance that for most of the 17th century, a hundred years before the Haitian Revolution, Brazilian Maroons harnessed distinct ideologies of freedom and multiracial citizenship born from African diasporic political experience.

More incredible, this alternative social vision was institutionalized within a state formation able to wage protracted armed struggle against a preeminent European power, thus undermining the white supremacist ideological and political foundations of the plantation system as a whole.

We can only wonder how the history of the Atlantic World would have unfolded had Palmares survived.

Erasing the Erasure of Africa

Nonetheless, despite any absences or gaps in Born in Blackness, inevitable for any single volume attempting to cover 600 years of history, French succeeds remarkably in his overarching goal of contesting the “diminishment, trivialization, and erasure of Africans and of people of African descent from the story of the modern world.” (3)

Through his persuasively woven narrative, French shows how it was the resilience and mental fortitude of Africans, their muscles and sinews, their adaptability, perspicacity and will to survive that positioned Black people as the harbingers of modernity and as powerful actors who made history, albeit under conditions not of their choosing.

The book is all the more impressive for covering such complex and expansive themes in a linguistically clear, efficient manner indicative of French’s journalistic background, accessible to a general audience and knowledgeable non-specialists alike.

Finally, though not a stated objective of the book, Born in Blackness stands as an excellent primer on the importance of the movement for reparations. Although no single dollar amount could ever repay the unquantifiable sacrifice endured by Africans and their descendants in the building of the modernity, the fact that Africa remains underdeveloped due to colonialism, and that the institutions and social hierarchies born in slavery still exist today in the Americas, make it imperative for anti-racist politics in the Atlantic World to demand comprehensive accountability and reparations.

Historical justice for Africans and their descendants remains as fraught and necessary a struggle as ever;(13) let this book stand as a reminder of why that fight is inextricable from the revolutionary work of building a new world.

Notes

1. “Sub-Saharan” is a term, itself descending from more openly racist nomenclature, that should properly be jettisoned for its conceptual uselessness in encompassing such a vast and diverse region of the world. Following journalist Max de Haldevang’s critique of the term, this review will use more accurate geographical markers to denote African regions. See: https://cgt.columbia.edu/news/morris-larkin-still-use-term-sub-saharan-africa/
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2. For an analysis of the debate on racial capitalism within Marxist theory, see: Foster, John Bellamy, Hannah Holleman, and Brett Clark. 2020. “Marx and Slavery.” Monthly Review, 96–121. https://doi.org/10.14452/MR-072-03-2020-07_9
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3. https://www.bostonreview.net/forum_response/stephanie-smallwood-what-slavery-tells-us/
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4. See historian Sabelo J Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s article on whitewashing colonialism: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/2/26/colonialism-in-africa-empire-was-not-ethical
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5. At the apex of sugar cane production in the 18th century Caribbean it was not uncommon for plantations to have 2000 or more enslaved workers, a scale that British factories would not reach until the mid-19th century. (177)
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6. To bring up one of the more memorable examples of European leaders knowing full well that the source of their power was grounded in slavery, French philosopher Voltaire noted that, in the wake of the Seven Years War with England in 1763, it was better to trade all of French Canada (which he derided as a “few acres of snow”) for the comparatively miniscule plantation island of Guadeloupe.
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7. It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the dynamics of creolization that French extensively explores in his book. Suffice it to say that by “creole,” French means “a distinctly new class of culturally and frequently racially mixed people who were the literal offspring of these sorts of [Afro-European] intercontinental contacts.” (139).
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8. Blackburn, Robin. 1997. “The Old World Background to European Colonial Slavery.” The William and Mary Quarterly, 65-102. https://doi.org/10.2307/2953313.
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9. Goldenberg, David M. 2017. Black and Slave: The Origins and History of the Curse of Ham. Berlin: De Gruyter.
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10. Blackburn, 92.
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11. Anderson, Robert Nelson. 1996. “The Quilombo of Palmares: A New Overview of a Maroon State in Seventeenth-Century Brazil.” Journal of Latin American Studies, 545–66. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022216X00023889.
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12. Ibid., 559. For a more extensive treatment of the debate surrounding the socio-political contours of Palmares, a polity which left none of its own documentary evidence, see: Schwartz, Stuart B. “Rethinking Palmares: Slave Resistance in Colonial Brazil.” In Critical Readings on Global Slavery, edited by Damian Alan Pargas & Felicia Ro?u, 1294–1325. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004346611_041.
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13. Indeed, at the time of writing this review, there is an ongoing debate within the Portuguese government on reparations for its role transatlantic slavery and colonialism: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68916320.
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September-October 2024, ATC 232