The so-called Age of Exploration wasn’t driven by Europeans chasing goods from Asia, a continent with which they had tied for centuries. European developed modern navigation and empire-making in pursuit of the gold-rich African empires that were beginning to open.
That set off the last 400 years of history, including the modern, caste-making of race, simplifying all African peoples into a single “black” category. That’s from the 2021 book by longtime journalist Howard W. French called “Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War.” (A review here)
Below find my notes for future reference. I didn’t take as thorough notes as I often do because I found myself reading with a near-toddler but it’s a start.
My notes
- Transformation of African peoples into a single blackness just like a uniform white evolved in Americas
- In 1996, Berlin “From Creole to African” says this happened not in Africa or Americas but in an in-between space
- 12m slaves, 6m lost in their pursuit
- European interest in Africa came first because of gold not Asia
- Toni Morrison: black people were the cauldron for the American melting pot, against which others could rally
- Berlin conference in 1884: Europe had just 10% control of Africa but divided up the rest; by 1914, they owned 90%
- The scramble for Africa was predated by a scramble for Africans
- Silver in Bolivia and gold and Brazil’s sugar crop first benefited Portugal but also generally brought wealth to fund the Industrial Revolution
- 1622: Portuguese invasion of Kongo
- 1760s Tackys War
- WeB Dubois: Black Reconstruction In America essay (disparaged by mainstream press at the time)
- Cotton and plantation slavery was the primary driver of the United States to major industrial power
- Eli Whitney’s cotton gin may play smaller role than getting ever more labor out of slaves
- Saint Domingue’s slave revolt (Haitian Revolution) against French forced the French to give up on Americas, selling Louisiana purchase to Jefferson
- Alexander Hamilton: “To the courage and obstinate resistance made by its black inhabitants are we indebted for the obstacles which delayed the colonization of Louisiana”
