Author Howard W. French traveled the world as a foreign correspondent for various media before joining The New York Times in 1986 in West Africa, later working for The Times as bureau chief for Central America and the Caribbean, and then also for West and Central Africa, Japan and China. He has been a professor of journalism at Columbia University since 2008.
Now his book »Africa and the Emergence of the Modern World. Eine Globalgeschichte «, published by Liveright in 2021, is also available in German translation. The nearly 500-page work spans more than six centuries and is divided into five chapters. It spans from the discovery of Africa via the transatlantic slave trade to a reimagining of the advent of the modern age. The author sheds intense light on the relationship between Africa and Europe, beginning in the fifteenth century, from which our modernity finally arose. In doing so, he is clearly distancing himself from a European-centric world view and focusing on the continent of Africa.
Howard W. Begins’ work can be read as a correction of the role of Africa and Africans in shaping economic structures and political developments in our modern world. The author traces in detail the history of slavery and the slave trade in Africa and comes to the conclusion that Europe’s prosperity and power are built on the basis of Europe’s economic and political relations with Africa. The slave trade took place across the Atlantic Ocean for centuries. They grew sugar, tobacco, and cotton on New World plantations. Life expectancy after abduction was usually only seven years or less due to the worst living conditions. The number of Africans brought to America as part of the slave trade is estimated at twelve million. The total population of Africa reached about 100 million in the mid-nineteenth century.
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