Born in Blackness

Born in Blackness is ultimately a book about restoration. Howard W. French takes a story that has been told for centuries as a European achievement and restores Africa to its proper place at the center of it. The gold that capitalized early modern Europe was African. The sugar and cotton that fueled European industrialization were produced by enslaved African hands. The musical and cultural innovations that shaped modern global culture emerged from communities forged in the crucible of African enslavement and survival. The diplomatic relationships that brought Europe outward into the world were initially relationships among sophisticated states, not encounters between civilization and savagery. To tell the story of modernity without Africa is to tell less than half the story, and to tell that half in a way that misrepresents how the whole came to be. French's book is an act of historical correction, and its central insistence is one the rest of the world is still in the process of absorbing: the modern world was not made in Europe alone. It was born in Blackness.

Howard W. French is an American journalist, author, and academic whose career has bridged decades of frontline reporting on Africa with deep historical scholarship. He spent more than two decades as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, with extensive postings across Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. His reporting from West and Central Africa, where he served as bureau chief, shaped his lifelong commitment to recovering and retelling African history on its own terms. He is currently a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. His other books include China's Second Continent, which examines Chinese economic engagement with Africa, and Everything Under the Heavens, a study of Chinese historical and geopolitical imagination. Born in Blackness, published in 2021, represents the synthesis of his journalistic and scholarly work, and is widely regarded as one of the most important recent contributions to the history of the Atlantic world and the African diaspora.