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

From the first Portuguese caravels edging toward the gold-rich heart of West Africa to the gun-smoke dawn of World War II, Howard W. French drags the map south and lets Kongo kings, Haitian freedom fighters, and medieval emperors stride onto center stage, proving that Europe’s celebrated Age of Discovery began as a feverish gold chase, not an innocent quest for Asia. In Lisbon countinghouses and Atlantic sugar ports, the flow of sugar, tobacco, and twelve million enslaved bodies turns Racial Justice and Economic Justice into burning questions that still brand our classrooms. French’s narrative barrels across six bold centuries—through seventeenth-century battles where Kongo sovereigns outfox European invaders, through Haiti’s midnight uprising that rewired American Political Justice—until it confronts the tidy “rise of the West” myth with a glare. Each page feels like cracking open a hidden vault: twenty black-and-white images, four maps, and Laurent Dubois’s praise light the way, yet one nagging riddle hovers—why do textbooks still relegate Africa to the footnotes? If you teach, study, or preach, click “Learn More” and walk into a story powerful enough to reorder the modern world.