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

Released on by Howard W. French
preview-18

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

  • Author : Howard W. French
  • Release Date : 2021-10-12
  • Publisher : Liveright Publishing
  • Genre : History
  • Pages : 444
  • ISBN 13 : 1631495836
  • File Size : 68,68 MB
DOWNLOAD BOOK

Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War by Howard W. French PDF Summary

Book Description: Revealing the central yet intentionally obliterated role of Africa in the creation of modernity, Born in Blackness vitally reframes our understanding of world history. Traditional accounts of the making of the modern world afford a place of primacy to European history. Some credit the fifteenth-century Age of Discovery and the maritime connection it established between West and East; others the accidental unearthing of the “New World.” Still others point to the development of the scientific method, or the spread of Judeo-Christian beliefs; and so on, ad infinitum. The history of Africa, by contrast, has long been relegated to the remote outskirts of our global story. What if, instead, we put Africa and Africans at the very center of our thinking about the origins of modernity? In a sweeping narrative spanning more than six centuries, Howard W. French does just that, for Born in Blackness vitally reframes the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the economic ascendancy of Europe, the anchoring of democracy in the West, and the fulfillment of so-called Enlightenment ideals all grew out of Europe’s dehumanizing engagement with the “dark” continent. In fact, French reveals, the first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not—as we are so often told, even today—Europe’s yearning for ties with Asia, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge a trade in gold with legendarily rich Black societies sequestered away in the heart of West Africa. Creating a historical narrative that begins with the commencement of commercial relations between Portugal and Africa in the fifteenth century and ends with the onset of World War II, Born in Blackness interweaves precise historical detail with poignant, personal reportage. In so doing, it dramatically retrieves the lives of major African historical figures, from the unimaginably rich medieval emperors who traded with the Near East and beyond, to the Kongo sovereigns who heroically battled seventeenth-century European powers, to the ex-slaves who liberated Haitians from bondage and profoundly altered the course of American history. While French cogently demonstrates the centrality of Africa to the rise of the modern world, Born in Blackness becomes, at the same time, a far more significant narrative, one that reveals a long-concealed history of trivialization and, more often, elision in depictions of African history throughout the last five hundred years. As French shows, the achievements of sovereign African nations and their now-far-flung peoples have time and again been etiolated and deliberately erased from modern history. As the West ascended, their stories—siloed and piecemeal—were swept into secluded corners, thus setting the stage for the hagiographic “rise of the West” theories that have endured to this day. “Capacious and compelling” (Laurent Dubois), Born in Blackness is epic history on the grand scale. In the lofty tradition of bold, revisionist narratives, it reframes the story of gold and tobacco, sugar and cotton—and of the greatest “commodity” of them all, the twelve million people who were brought in chains from Africa to the “New World,” whose reclaimed lives shed a harsh light on our present world.

Disclaimer: www.yourbookbest.com does not own Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War books pdf, neither created or scanned. We just provide the link that is already available on the internet, public domain and in Google Drive. If any way it violates the law or has any issues, then kindly mail us via contact us page to request the removal of the link.

China's Second Continent

China's Second Continent

File Size : 83,83 MB
Total View : 3539 Views
DOWNLOAD

A New York Times Notable Book Chinese immigrants of the recent past and unfolding twenty-first century are in search of the African dream. So explains indefatig

Everything Under the Heavens

Everything Under the Heavens

File Size : 95,95 MB
Total View : 752 Views
DOWNLOAD

From the former New York Times Asia correspondent and author of China's Second Continent, an incisive investigation of China's ideological development as it bec

Disappearing Shanghai

Disappearing Shanghai

File Size : 38,38 MB
Total View : 1318 Views
DOWNLOAD

This book is a photographic exploration of life in the old and rapidly disappearing quarters of Shanghai, with accompanying poems and essays by the author of fi

A Fistful of Shells

A Fistful of Shells

File Size : 4,4 MB
Total View : 3131 Views
DOWNLOAD

By the time the “Scramble for Africa” among European colonial powers began in the late nineteenth century, Africa had already been globally connected for ce