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Black lives literally did not matter – other than to make their “owners” rich. It was cheaper, wrote one English planter on Antigua in 1751, “to work slaves to the utmost, and by the little fare and hard usage, to wear them out before they become useless and unable to do service, and then to buy new ones to fill up their places”. Most were then worked to death, the lifespan of trafficked people reckoned to be seven years or less. The scale of human suffering that followed Columbus’s crossing of the Atlantic is almost impossible to conceive, let alone describe: modern consensus is that around 12 million were put on slave ships in appalling conditions. As it turned out, the most important consequences were for the people of Africa. These experiences, mainly dating to the 1400s, were to prove instrumental not only in the settling of the Americas and the opening up of new trade routes to Europe. It was along Africa’s western coast that Europeans “perfected techniques of map-making and navigation”, where ship designs were tested and improved and where sailors learned to understand the winds of the Atlantic Ocean. The impetus for what turned into the creation of multiple European empires stretching across continents did not come from the “yearning for ties with Asia”, but from a “centuries-old desire to forge trading ties with legendarily rich Black societies” in Africa that were home to huge quantities of gold and an “inexhaustible source” of labour.
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That process starts, argues French, with the age of discovery. The problem is not just that the people and cultures of Africa have been ignored and left to one side rather, that they have been so miscast that the story of the global past has become part of a profound “mistelling”. T he way we think about history is entirely wrong, says Howard W French at the start of this magnificent, powerful and absorbing book.