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

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Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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

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). 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. 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.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”. Q. How do I create a Gates Notes account? A. There are three ways you can create a Gates Notes account: 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 He writes: “The gigantic boost that [this gold] provided the [Portuguese] crown … made it possible for Lisbon to keep pace with Spain in their headlong course into ocean faring, discovery, conquest, crusading, and intercontinental trade.”

A History of Modernity That Puts Africa at Center Stage

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. Using Biglan’s and Holland’s Classifications to Understand Similarities and Differences Between Disciplines in Multidisciplinary/Interdisciplinary Education

A "file MD5" is a hash that gets computed from the file contents, and is reasonably unique based on that content. All shadow libraries that we have indexed on here primarily use MD5s to identify files. 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.” Please report metadata errors at the source library. If there are multiple source libraries, know that we pull metadata from top to bottom, so the first one might be sufficient.