Most of what we’re taught about African history and indeed about the history of the modern era, and the history of the Atlantic world, completely skips this era. This was one of my primary motivations in writing a book about this. I make the argument that the primary impetus behind the creation of the modern world, as we understand it, and for Europe’s separation, politically and economically speaking, from other previously more powerful parts of the world, was not the complex of Judeo-Christian ideas or the Protestant work ethic, or even the scientific method. I don’t say that because I don’t think there was nothing at all to these things. But that’s all we heard for the last 500 years, to such a degree that it smothers out everything else; so much so that we have lost sight of what is hiding in plain sight, which is that it was the expropriation of billions and billions of man hours of African labor, and the seizure and expropriation of millions of square miles of territory, in the so called New World, that gave Europeans the wherewithal that forms the very basis of the creation of the West—by which I mean the condominium between Europe and the New World.

The creation of this West would have been utterly impossible, unthinkable without the expert expropriation of these billions and billions of man hours of labor. I go into some degree of detail about not just the crude creation of wealth and power in Europe’s ascent, but also on the impact of all of this on European society and culture and on English first, and then subsequently, British society and culture. Especially, in the period prior to the Industrial Revolution, in which I say for example, the impact of all of the newly abundant and cheap calories that were derived from African labor in the New World revolutionized the English and subsequently the European diet, and gave English workers and subsequently other European workers caloric basis to increase their productivity. New crops in great quantities like coffee, and cocoa, a bit later tea, together with sugar, which is the most important economic product of this entire era. They utterly transformed the civic culture, through the creation of the coffee shop, which is another outgrowth of African slave labor. Africans grew the coffee. Africans grew the sugar that made the coffee palatable. Suddenly then, newspapers thrived in the coffee shop because for the first time you had a captive audience of people who instead of being drunk in a tavern are sitting around drinking stimulants, and a culture of discussion of the affairs of the day based on published information known as the newspaper takes root for the very first time.

It’s really a combination of things. The first is the remarkable personal coincidence that I have worked in prolonged ways in so many parts of the world that serve as the backdrop for this history. So I would have to have been a pretty insensitive person not to have begun to try to stitch together a big picture of these things. I also spent more than a decade working in East Asia, and one of the mostly silent, but ever-present sentiments or ideas that runs through societies there has to do with Asia’s relationship to the West. Why is it that the West became ascendant at the time that it did? Especially given that East Asia’s civilizations are older and had long been richer. What brought that about? What was innate to Western versus Eastern civilization? How much of this was foreordained? How much of it is fated to be semi-permanent or much longer lasting? Because questions like these were in the air everywhere I went in Asia, it helped jar me, or jostle some of the big picture questions I had about the Atlantic world that that were partly an outgrowth of my personal experience, and got me to think on a longer timescale, in historical terms, about how it happened that the West rose the way it did. When I scratched around the story of Africa’s role in this, I saw that having Africa or Africans at its disposal turns out to have been the primary reason why Europe, and subsequently what we call the West, came to be ascendant over the East. The East didn’t have an entire continent whose resources, both natural and human, it could train to its own purposes. It only had its own resources and its own labor. I say that if Europe had not had the benefit of [Africa’s] natural resources, and then subsequent centuries of African labor, Europe would have been a marginal player in world history in the era that’s under discussion. I don’t mean to say by this, however, that Europeans had no talents or no qualities, or that they wouldn’t have had their own fair share of achievements.

Alright, so this is a question that fascinates me, and that I first began to explore in my very first book, A Continent for the Taking. We can’t really say anything with certainty with big picture counterfactuals about how things would have worked out. There’s just too much complexity involved. But a couple of things stand out to me. One of them is that Africa in the late Middle Ages, and indeed in the early modern era, was in the process of quite advanced state formation in some places. Kingdoms in present day Ghana, Nigeria, what is commonly called Sudanic Africa, were among them. The other big example is Kongo, spelled with a K, and there are others. The speculative counterfactual answer to your question that seems most persuasive to me is that if Africa had not had the accidental history of the 15th and 16th century, whereby the Portuguese and then subsequently other European powers, begin to engage south of the Sahara and to first trade for large quantities of gold, and then subsequently seduced African powers into the trade in slaves; if those things had not happened, Africa as a continent, especially the Atlantic part of the continent, would have been afforded much more time and space to advance or to continue this process of state formation. In the book I also make a very detailed argument about the demographic impact of the slave trade. Here, I’m making a political argument that if Africa had been afforded more space and time in that critical era, then African states would have continued on their development and probably would have emerged much larger, extensive—geographically speaking—as well as more populous, and therefore more powerful and more capable of resisting or holding their ground, vis-a-vis European powers. If the contact had come later, one can imagine a scenario whereby maybe gun technology would have spread in Africa. Buying guns from other places, but maybe, also the development of guns made in Africa, as there were quite exquisite metalworking capabilities on the continent.

I talked about going to places like Barbados, which was the first place that Britain or, at the time England, initiated its plantation complex, and where extraordinary wealth starts to be produced from the fruits of African labor, being stunned by the absence of monuments in what is now and has been, for some time, an independent country, with a government run by people who are descendants of Africans. This created a shock of awareness in me. I’m American, and I’m deeply familiar with the lack of that very thing in my own society. I also found that when I went to Brazil, home to the largest black population of any society outside of Africa. I go to Ghana which played such a foundational role in the creation of the world, the world that is at the heart of my book and a society that, in the last 70 years, has played a foundational role in the creation of the modern politics of independence for Africa. But, even in Ghana, very little awareness of the beginning of the true nature of the beginnings of this world, very little public effort, at remembrance and of celebration and exploration of this history. This created a pain, and urgency, as a person of African descent, to speed up this excavation and to become more active in the digging up of this history, to become more willing to probe deeply into the past, or the beginnings of the modern age, and to cast off the very pat explanations we have about how we arrived at this moment. Erasure is mostly not an active, or certainly not a violent thing. It’s mostly a subliminal thing. African Americans have for centuries been taught versions of history that write their ancestors out of the picture. Through a series of images and archetypes that are present in literature, and advertising, and entertainment, and one thing after another, we have been subliminally induced to devalue ourselves, or our ancestors and their role in building the world that we all live in. So this notion that our ancestors might have played a really important role in building up the modern world is something that is building momentum. W.E.B. Du Bois helped start this reflection off a century ago, but we’re only just now achieving some momentum, we’re excavating our way out of this deep hole where we ourselves as people of color, allow ourselves to be invested in understanding these stories and to reassess our own central role in the building of the world. The time has come to finally bring those stories to a broader public and force a reckoning with the broader public in terms of understanding that the modern world was not just built by Europeans, based on the most positive kinds of European values that we are all taught to celebrate, and to respect that a lot more was involved.

I first encountered this as a foreign correspondent working for The New York Times, covering the Mobutu period in then Zaire [after Mobutu was overthrown in 1997, a new government changed the name of the country to the Democratic Republic of the Congo]. And the story of this kingdom has been with me ever since in a haunting, persistent way. I discovered the correspondence between the king of Kongo, and the king of Portugal, and in it, the king of Kongo is more or less imploring the king of Portugal to suspend the slave trade. He’s saying to the king of Portugal: I thought we were brothers. But now, what’s happening is by the avarice of your people, you’re destroying my kingdom. And the king of Portugal replies, listen, that’s too bad. I’m terribly sorry. But people are the only thing that you have that we value, and we wish to purchase them.

But when I got to work on this book, and dove into the archives, I discovered a much thicker history even than I had suspected back then. The Portuguese arrived in Kongo just a few years after they arrived in Elmina. When the Portuguese come ashore, it becomes clear and evident to the Kongolese that the Portuguese have as a Christian religious symbol, the cross. Well, by extraordinary coincidence, it appears that the cross was already one of the most important religious symbols in the Kongolese religion at the time. So on this basis, the Kongolese are intrigued enough to be seduced into an initiation into Christianity. A church is built very quickly there. The Portuguese take a few Kongolese back to Europe, and train them in Portuguese. And then they visit the Kongolese capital, M’banza Kongo. Political relations are established. All of the Kongolese royalty begin to learn Portuguese, become fluent in Portuguese language and literature, and use the Portuguese language as a means of mastering Christianity and in government. The Kongolese King sends all kinds of envoys including his children to go to school and the children of other nobles to go to school in Europe. Kongolese priests begin to be ordained by the Catholic Church, and by the Vatican itself. There are bishops serving as representatives in the Vatican. They acquire an understanding of the statecraft of Portugal, and of other European countries. There’s no question whether or not the Portuguese could conquer these people. The Portuguese had no ability to project force in anything like the numbers that would have been required to conquer anybody.

This is another one of these powerful coincidences that make history so fascinating. The eventual success of the Haitian Revolution was probably in part helped by the fact that many of the Africans who were imported to Haiti, as enslaved peoples, in the 18th century came from areas in Africa that had advanced states involved in very complicated warfare. As the commonly received story of slavery in the West would have it, Africans had few qualities, except their being able to work in hot conditions bending over cropland, producing commodities for Europe. These Africans who came from nearby part of what is now Angola, and from places like Benin and Nigeria, and in Ghana, for example, all had experiences often directly of having been subjects of pretty advanced states. So they had an awareness of not just what it meant to be free as an individual, but to be part of a polity that was independent and self-governed. On top of that, they had an experience in many of these examples, especially the ones I’ve just cited of Kongo, Angola, Benin, and Nigeria, places in Dahomey, for example, and in Ghana, of intense and highly organized warfare. They already had really complicated ideas about how the world is made up, what it means to be a free person, and what it means to have your own polity and what it means to fight a war. So the French didn’t really know what they were getting into in that sense. When the Haitian Revolution came together, those capacities and experiences were a resource for people like Toussaint L’Ouverture, who was able to lead these black armies to extraordinary and history-making political victories against a series of white armies.

I guess there’s one thing that we haven’t really talked about, and that is the history of the United States itself. We don’t learn about how the Haitian Revolution utterly changed the course of American history. It made Napoleon, who had ambitions on many fronts desperate to liquidate his enormous position in continental America. He sold the territory that comprises the Louisiana Purchase for a pittance, to the US, and essentially created a nearly continental sized country called the United States. Americans talk of the expansion to a continental sized country in terms of the pluck and the courage and willingness to conquer “the untamed West.” But this all begins with Haiti. Once this happens, the Mississippi River Valley becomes a site of economic exploitation on a very large scale by white people. These territories became the focus of cotton cultivation. And cotton cultivation, like sugar cultivation, was performed by black people, the descendants of people brought from Africa in chains. Cotton became, in a shockingly brief period of time, the world’s most important commodity, and the only commodity that other countries were basically desperate to buy from the US. It was the largest export of the US, incomparably greater than any other product from the beginning of the 19th century until the Civil War. That cotton, which was essential to England, and its industrial revolution, was produced by the descendants of people brought from Africa in chains, enslaved peoples, and so cotton in this era replaces sugar and is the most important factor in the driving of this ascension of the West and the rise of the US economically as a power. And the deepening of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain.

I think that we have an opportunity now to overcome something inflicted upon us, but also something that involves a degree of self-infliction, through short-sightedness and sometimes petty chauvinism. African Americans, for a very long time, have been disinclined to be deeply interested in Africa. In a previous era, we were actually actively encouraged to be disinterested in Africa, and to be furthermore ashamed of Africa, to seek to distance ourselves from Africa. By the same token, Africans have, through some strange process, have sometimes found it attractive to disclaim or express a disdain for members of the African diaspora. Especially African Americans. Yes, they can consume some of the culture here and there at the margin. But there’s this petty chauvinism that one still comes across: where Africans talk about African Americans and people in other parts of the African diaspora as inferior or fundamentally different from them, or irrelevant to their lives. I say this is a self-inflicted wound, because it is so tragic. The greatest resource that Africans and Africans in the diaspora have is each other. Understanding their history, which is a common history, is the way to grasp that and to re-stitch the world back together with more coherence; a world where we take on a deeper understanding of the profound ways in which our histories have always been intertwined. We share responsibility for the creation of everything you can point to in the world. And that is our product as much as it is of a Judeo Christian thing, or of a scientific method thing, or a Protestant work ethic thing, or any other thing that you can point to. For our own good, we need to come to that realization and begin to work across the ocean and build and restore those bridges. That is vital to reclaiming or restoring our proper place in each of these scattered parts of the Atlantic world, in the bigger, broader world.