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By the 1620s, Brazil’s combined trade in sugar and slaves had eclipsed Portugal’s Asia trade in overall value, and had equaled the value of Spain’ s haul of American silver. In 1600 Brazil had supplied nearly all the sugar consumed in Western Europe. But in a striking measure of just how the sugar revolution progressed in the W est Indies, by 1700, Barbados alone was producing more of the commodity than the Bahia region of Brazil, supplying nearly half of Europe’s consumption—despite its later start and vastly smaller size. By 1660 it is estimated that tiny Barbados’ s sugar production alone was worth more than the combined exports of all of Spain’s New W orld colonies . And this was just for starters. From 1650 to 1800, as major new sugar islands came on line in the Caribbean, sugar consumption in Britain would increase 2500 percent , and over this time, the market value of sugar would consistently exceed the value of all other commodities combined. It stands to reason that a boom so lar ge and so sustained would have been enormously stimulative, in ways both direct and indirect. In London the number of refineries shot up from five in 1615, to thirty in 1670, and perhaps to seventy-five by 1700; many other sugar refineries set up operations in smaller port cities and provincial centers. And these were not, by a long measure, the only commercial and growth-inducing ef fects of the sugar and slave complex. In fact, the sugar boom created a long succession of strong, systemic economic waves that were felt throughout the Atlantic world. We have spoken already about how the early Portuguese trade with West Africa strengthened circuits of trade in Europe and beyond, with African gold being used to buy manilhas and other metalwares from northern Europe, usually via Dutch markets. As Holland temporarily usurped Portugal’ s imperial outposts in Africa and Brazil, and even as it later largely abandoned territorial empire in the Atlantic world in order to specialize in the shipping of goods and slaves, it managed to outcompete its Iberian rivals through not only superior firepower but lower costs. The Dutch produced the goods Africans prized most and could supply them more cheaply than the Portuguese. This included textiles, which were about to become the most important product of the industrial age. West Africans loved India’s high-quality lightweight dyed cloths, so the Dutch busied themselves making passable knockof fs, which they sold in large quantities along the African coast. In its early empire, England assiduously followed the Dutch commercial example, even as it set about expanding its power at sea in order to muscle out its close neighbor and rival. African markets would play a vital role in the growth of English manufacturing in general, albeit mostly indirectly . This included everything from guns to ships and from rope to sails, among many items required for long-distance maritime trade. But as their fledgling Caribbean empire grew based on the expropriation of African labor, the English found especially important new markets for the next big industry of the future, textiles, in the form of clothing for slaves. The importance of slaves in the rise of English textiles was not limited to the sale of cloth at England’ s African slaving outposts, like Cape Coast, or on its own sugar islands, either . As part of its contest with Holland in the mid-seventeenth century, England provided support to Portuguese efforts to throw off Dutch rule in Brazil. This came at the price of opening Brazil’ s markets to English manufactures. By the mid- eighteenth century, this turn of affairs had brought the Marquis of Pombal, the Portuguese king’ s chief minister, to rue that “ [g]old and silver are fictitious riches ; the negroes that work in the mines of Brazil must be clothed by England, by which the value of their produce become relative to the price of cloth.” Barbados and the other Caribbean sugar colonies that followed in its wake not only provided a direct boost to the European economy in the seventeenth century , but perhaps even more critically , they threw a lifeline to the struggling colonies of British America, which were restricted from selling many types of manufactures into the protected English market. T o the Americans’ good fortune, they found avid buyers on Barbados for products both rough and finished. As we have seen, these included furniture, livestock (both for its meat and manure, which was highly prized as fertilizer), and lumber. Barbados imported such things and many more because once sugar monoculture had taken over on that booming island, productive land was deemed simply too valuable to farm for food or put to any other use and so, like a modern petro state, pretty much everything required for local consumption was imported. In time, this even came to include New England rum. As Eric Williams wrote in Capitalism and Slavery of a time just a few decades later: In 1770 the continental colonies sent to the West Indies nearly one- third of their exports of dried fish and almost all their pickled fish, seven-eighths of their oats, seven-tenths of their corn, almost all their peas and beans, half of their flour , all their butter and cheese, over one-quarter of their rice, almost all their onions; five-sixths of their pine, oak and cedar boards, over half of their staves, nearly all their hoops; all their horses, sheep, hogs and poultry; almost all their soap and candles. As [an earlier historian] has told us, “It was the wealth accumulated fr om West Indian trade which mor e than anything else underlay the pr osperity and civilization of New England and the Middle Colonies.” To better understand North America’ s dependence on trade with the sugar islands, it helps to put a figure on the kind of wealth disparities that existed within the British Empire. T aking Jamaica as an example, one historian has estimated that annual per capita income among whites on that island in the decade that Williams wrote of was more than thirty-five times higher than in Britain’s mainland colonies, £2201, compared with £60.2.

UNDOING THE GROSS UNDERST ATEMENT of the contributions that Africa and Africans made to the creation of the modern world and restoring them to their proper place requires multiple approaches, or lines of ar gumentation, drawing in evidence from many directions. So far, we have emphasized the direct impact of the labor of slaves taken from Africa (as well as that of their offspring). In the sixteenth century , when the American slave trade took off in earnest, 370,000 Africans were brought in chains across the Atlantic. This number would increase fivefold in the century that followed, which saw the launching of Caribbean sugar . And in the eighteenth century, the slave traffic increased another threefold, landing a further 6.1 million into New World slavery. In addition to the vast output—not just of sugar , but of many other commodities—created by this labor, in the immediate prior chapter and elsewhere, we have spoken about the lar ge new markets, or demand, created by the need to clothe, feed, and transport slaves. As we have already seen, these were responsible not just for boosting business, but for integrating markets, first between northern and southern Europe, and later elsewhere.

Most important, perhaps, was the effect on New England and others among Britain’s American colonies, whose economies were made viable in lar ge part by demand from the slave societies of the Caribbean. This, in turn, made them “ the key of the Indies ,” in the phrase of the historian Wendy Warren. T o give an indication of the degree of complementarity that was struck up between these two regions of the British Empire, a scholar has estimated that “ of colonial shipping trading to Barbados in 1686, 80 percent of tonnage was registered in New England, more than a third of it in Boston.” Two decades ago, Kenneth Pomeranz, an economic historian who specializes in China, made a powerful contribution to our understanding of Europe’ s transcendent rise in the nineteenth century by investigating how Britain in particular managed to surpass the longtime previous incumbent as the world’ s richest nation, China. Pomeranz’ s landmark study, The Great Divergence: Eur ope, China, and the Making of the Modern W orld Economy , opens the door for deepening our understanding of the contribution of Africa and Africans to the modernity we share. It credits two main factors for Europe’s sharp, British-led ascent. The first of these, he said, was the “ecological dividend,” the windfall that Europe reaped by completely taking over the Americas in an astoundingly brief period of time, effectively integrating many millions of square miles of agriculturally productive land into the European economic sphere. Pomeranz’ s second factor was Europe’s expropriation of African labor on an immense scale through slavery, or what he rather delicately called “ the fruits of overseas coercion .” * Pomeranz’s joining of these two factors, land and labor , greatly improves our picture of slavery’s central role in the emergence of a new global capitalist economy centered on the Atlantic. The Great Diver gence argued that Britain received a tremendous dietary boost from the takeof f of commoditized sugar , which injected dramatically more calories into the daily fare of its population. Just as critically, it managed to do so remarkably cheaply, especially once Barbados and the follow-on English sugar islands of the Caribbean hit their strides as producers. The caloric boost furnished by cheap sugar , Pomeranz postulated, fueled the long, intense workdays of England’ s early industrial mill laborers. Without it, the country would have been required to devote vastly more of its own land and labor to the provision of these new caloric sources. Fifteen years before Pomeranz, in Sweetness and Power , the anthropologist Sidney Mintz emphasized the huge impact of cane and its by-products on eating habits in England. Mintz estimated that sugar accounted for a mere 2 percent of Britain’ s caloric intake in 1800. But by the end of that century, the very century of Britain’ s historic ascension, this number had risen to 14 percent —far more than any of its European rivals. Measured another way, the takeoff of sugar consumption may seem even more impressive: Per capita consumption of sugar in England r ose from about 2 pounds per person in the 1660s to 4 pounds per person by the 1690s and continued to expand in the eighteenth century . By the time of the American Revolution, every man, woman and child in England on average consumed 23 pounds of sugar a year . . . .

British colonists on the North American mainland imported less than half as much sugar, about 14 pounds per person in 1770, but made up for it with a much higher consumption of sugar ’s by- pr oducts, rum and molasses . Dietitians today may frown, but as Pomeranz reasoned, these caloric developments helped boost domestic productivity in critical ways. The entry of cheap sugar into the English diet did far more than produce an onslaught of cakes, tarts, and other confectionary goods. It paved the way for caf feine-containing beverages like cof fee, which was also slave grown in the Americas (as well as cocoa, another stimulant), and tea, which followed the coffee craze to become the national drink a century later .

Because water supplies were often unhygienic, many English had hitherto favored ale, consuming it even during daytime work hours, which inevitably produced lethargic if not disorderly behavior . The era of Big Sugar therefore ushered in a new age of alertness based on drinks that had the additional benefit of being hygienic, because their preparation required boiling water. And at roughly the same moment, with these new stimulants came yet another , tobacco, which had the additional merit for the workplace, if not for long-term health, of suppressing appetite. As the historian of the Caribbean Randy Brown told me in summing up the shift that underpinned the Industrial Revolution, “they switched from downers to uppers.” There is yet another crucial and surprising dimension of sugar ’s impact, however—one that Pomeranz leaves unexplored. In speaking of the modern, we must consider much more than just economics, and sugar and its stimulant companions played a role of outsized importance in developments in another sphere altogether: the nature of society itself. The era of Barbados’ s takeoff and of the sugar revolution that it produced was one of fundamental change in the development in Britain of what we now call civil society . The availability of hot, sweetened, stimulating drinks gave birth to the first coffee shop , which opened its doors in Oxford in 1650. From there, cof fee shops quickly spread to London, where they proliferated, and this in turn helped rapidly establish a medium only recently invented in Germany: the newspaper . Gathering places like cof fee shops and the availability of regularly printed political news in this format are what gave birth to a modern public sphere, to employ the terminology of the German philosopher and sociologist Jür gen Habermas. This is a fancy way of referring to the emergence of a richly enhanced shared sense of public affairs and citizen participation that emer ged during the Enlightenment. For Habermas, conversations over caffeinated drink and newspapers in places like the coffee shop marked “ the first time in history [that people] came together as equals to reason critically about public af fairs.” Describing the London of the mid- and late seventeenth century , the historian of early modern Europe Brian William Cowan wrote, “ The numerous coffeehouses of the metropolis were greater than the sum of their parts; they formed an interactive system in which information was socialized and made sense of by the various constituencies of the city .” The coffeehouse, in other words, became “the primary social space in which ‘news’ was both produced and consumed,” and “no cof feehouse worth its name could refuse to supply its customers with a selection of newspapers.” This transformation in the social life of England was pithily captured in a couplet from a satire called “The Student,” published in 1751. Dinner over, to Tom’s or to Clapham’ s I go . The news of the T own so impatient to know . Through major historic social transformations like these, we come finally to the understanding that the Enlightenment itself had vital roots in the toil and sweat of African captives, traf ficked and put to work in gangs on the integrated plantations that were becoming the dominant model of sugar production in the Caribbean by the mid- to late seventeenth century .

Anticipating the objection that Britain could have eventually acquired its calories from alternative sources, Pomeranz carefully demonstrates just how extraordinary a boon in metabolic and, just as critically, environmental terms New World sugar amounted to for Britain: [A]n acre of tropical sugar land yields as many calories as mor e than 4 acres of potatoes (which most eighteenth-century Eur opeans scorned), or 9–12 acres of wheat. The calories fr om the sugar consumed in the United Kingdom cir ca 1800 (using figures from Mintz) would have r equired at least 1,300,000 acr es of average- yielding English farms and conceivably over 1,900,000; in 1831, 1,900,000 to 2,600,000 acr es would have been needed. And since the land that remained uncultivated in Eur ope (and especially in Britain) by this time was har dly the continent’s best, we could plausibly make these numbers still lar ger . Pomeranz employs the same kind of logic involving opportunity cost to demonstrate that without its millions of square miles of fertile newly appropriated farmland in mainland North America and the slave labor that made its cotton the dominant global commodity in the nineteenth century , Britain would have been hard-pressed to sustain the kind of textile boom that lay at the heart of the Industrial Revolution: By 1815, Britain imported 100,000,000 pounds of New World cotton; by 1830, 263,000,000 pounds. If one r eplaced this fiber with an equivalent weight of hemp or flax, the extra acr eage needed would be comparatively modest: 200,000 acres in 1815, 500,000 in 1830. But hemp and flax—especially hemp—wer e both considered inferior fibers for most purposes and wer e much more difficult to work with, and processes for spinning them mechanically emer ged later than that for cotton. More important, both hemp and flax wer e extremely labor -intensive and manur e-intensive crops: so much so that most people only gr ew them as garden crops. Even thr ee centuries of government schemes and subsidies had failed to promote lar ger-scale pr oduction in either England or North America . This leaves wool, long Eur ope’s main clothing fiber . But raising enough sheep to replace the yarn made with Britain’ s New World cotton imports would have r equired staggering quantities of land:

almost 9,000,000 acr es in 1815, using ratios fr om model farms, and over 23,000,000 acres in 1830. This figur e surpasses Britain’s total crop and pastur e land combined . Even if one grants that such a replacement in quantitative terms could somehow have been arranged, which is unlikely , one encounters yet other problems. Ever since the thirteenth or fourteenth century , England’s leading export had been woolen textiles, which it had always sold to Europe.

European markets for English woolens grew more restricted with the rise of mercantilism in the seventeenth century and with competition from French production in the late eighteenth century . Tropical markets, whether in Africa or the New W orld, could not replace European demand, because wool was so unsuited to hot climates. England’ s economic takeoff and industrialization prior to its neighbors was contingent upon overcoming the limitations bound up in dependence on wool-led growth. This it was able to achieve via the new Atlantic markets, which only slavery and sugar had made possible. This Atlantic world was one of economic diversity and wealth-producing opportunities based on division of labor and trade. English manufactures found their way to markets so rich in mainland North America that they quickly matched and then exceeded the value of trade with Europe. As we have seen, England’ s American colonies financed their trade with the mother country by selling a wide range of their own goods first to Barbados and then to England’s other commodity-producing plantation-economy islands, such as Jamaica. Despite the nominal mercantilism of the era, opportunities for trade with others were numerous, whether between English slavers and the Spanish in the New W orld, or American colonies selling their wares in the Caribbean to the French and others. This triangular boom is what relieved England of the need to devote so much of its land for the sheep pasturage needed to produce wool, and it was all built on the solid foundation of African slavery. The belated but growing historical consensus about the importance of trade in goods that were grounded in or financed by slave plantation labor to Europe’s ascension has also received important support not just from historians but also from historically minded economists and political scientists. In an important paper issued five years after Pomeranz’ s Great Diver gence , three prominent MIT scholars, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson, placed the roots of this diver gence, or of Europe’s economic “miracle,” further back in the past, while also complicating the story substantially . Their study, “ The Rise of Europe : Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change and Economic Growth,” establishes a robust statistical connection between accelerated urbanization and economic growth in Europe and Pomeranz’ s “fruits of overseas coercion” in the New World between 1500 and 1850. What clearly emer ges through their data is that the differential in growth between W estern Europe compared with other regions during this time period is almost entirely accounted for by the growth of nations with access to the Atlantic Ocean, or what the authors call “Atlantic traders.” Strikingly , this differential already begins to show up almost immediately after Columbus’ s breakthrough to the New World (hence their use of as early a date as 1500). The data deployed by Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson sets apart economic growth in Atlantic port cities in western Europe not only from Mediterranean cities and landlocked eastern European cities, but also from Asian cities. † It is in the early seventeenth century , however , when the most dramatic diver gence begins, which seems unlikely to be a matter of happenstance. This was the precise moment when the Dutch and, right on their heels, the English became active in the pursuit of the wealth of Africa. This they did, of course, through trade in gold and slaves: for the Dutch, in Brazilian plantation agriculture and slave trading and related commerce in the W est Indies; for the British, in Barbados and subsequently in other emerging sugar islands in the Caribbean, which resulted in Britain’s becoming the Atlantic’s dominant slave-trading power . By situating the beginnings of this European diver gence as far back as 1500, the authors compel us to briefly return to our story of the emer gence of gold-rich kingdoms in Africa’s Sahel region in the medieval era, including the visit to Cairo and pilgrimage to Mecca of the Malian emperor Mansā Mūsā. That voyage caused the existence of abundant sources of African gold to be highlighted on European maps, prompting Portugal’s long quest down the coast of West Africa in search of the source of this great wealth. This is yet another way of demonstrating how Portugal’ s breakthrough in discovering gold at Elmina became a critical milestone in European history—one that has been widely overlooked in standard narratives of this period, which fast-forward to the discovery of sea routes to Asia, treating Africa as if it were of no intrinsic interest or benefit. For the post-sugar period of the eras they examine, Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson make no claim that, whether taken alone or together, the value of new trade with Africa (textiles and other goods for slaves) or with the Caribbean (for sugar and other plantation products) or with the North American mainland (British manufactures) constituted enough of a windfall to provide a one-stop explanation for a further acceleration in the economic rise of Europe’s major Atlantic powers beginning in the seventeenth century. The idea they advance instead provides a dif ferent theory of modernizing change, at once more subtle and complex. Early in this period, they say, Madrid and Lisbon garnered important new sources of wealth from mining (especially Spain) and plantation agriculture and slave trading (especially Portugal). These spurred meaningful increases in intra-European trade, as well as greatly increased imperial competition between these Iberian neighbors, and subsequently among a broadening array of European powers. The nations that benefited most from their bur geoning connections to the New World, however , were Holland, England (later Britain), and, subsequently, France. This ar gument is especially nuanced because it goes far beyond narrow measurements of income from trade in its assessment of the benefits and ef fects of empire. The authors postulate that the fact that the Dutch and English were far less absolutist in their political structures compared with the Iberian powers put them in a better position to seek out and develop wealth, and to profit more deeply as the Atlantic economy became more and more integrated. By the same token, they ar gue, the growth of new private fortunes, especially those bound up in the slave trade and in its plantation agriculture of fshoot, helped limit the power of monarchs, thus curtailing royal monopolies, strengthening political pluralism, and encouraging the emergence of stronger, more business-friendly institutions. Nowhere was this truer than in England. There, the slave trade became the central issue in the seventeenth- century debate over whether, in the words of the British historian W illiam A. Pettigrew, “ the legitimacy of the English state [ought] to derive from the crown or from the subjects of the crown.” The opponents of the royal monopoly over African slavery became highly adept at lobbying Parliament and giving vent to their views in a free press. So much so that Pettigrew has called these struggles “ not the relics of a traditional , precapitalist society [but] the distillate expressions of modern society’ s dynamic founding moments.” This, however, was just the beginning. As this lobby helped propel Britain to the status of a slaving superpower in the century that followed, it would crystallize into something more formal known as the West India Interest , which fought to defend slave plantation agriculture well beyond abolition in Britain in 1807. The role of new business elites whose prosperity was bound up in slavery became important features of the English Civil W ar of 1642–1649 and of the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689. Ironically, both of these events, when viewed from the narrow perspective of the English themselves, were fundamentally struggles aimed at expanding “freedom” by restricting the power of the monarchy . Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson draw upon this history to make a broader point about Europe’ s ascension: “ The evidence weighs against the most popular theories for the rise of Europe, which emphasize the continuity between pre-1500 and post- 1500 growth and the importance of certain distinctive European characteristics, such as culture, religion, geography and features of the European state system. Instead, it is consistent with theories that emphasize the importance of profits made in Atlantic trade, colonialism and slavery .” The authors go on to add, however, that the rise of Europe reflects not only the dir ect effects of Atlantic trade and colonialism but also a major social transformation induced by these opportunities. . . . Atlantic trade in Britain and the Netherlands (or, more appr opriately , in England and the Duchy of Burgundy) alter ed the balance of political power by enriching and strengthening commer cial interests outside the r oyal circle, including various overseas mer chants, slave traders, and various colonial planters. Through this channel, it contributed to the emergence of political institutions pr otecting merchants against royal power . In ar guments like these we thus see a corollary to the picture of how European societies were changed through the arrival of mass-consumed sugar and its accompanying stimulants, cof fee and tea. In that example, the major change brought about to Europe as a by-product of African sweat and productivity was to civil society and the emer gence of a modern public sphere. Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson’s insights offer a better understanding of how Europe’ s connections with Africa and, via African labor, to the plantation economies of the New W orld also helped impel modernizing political change in Europe at more elite levels in crucial yet seldom recognized ways. This brings us back to T illy’s theory that the more the fiscal-military state developed its powers of extraction in this era, the more it had to respond to the claims of its own citizens via political reforms and new notions of accountability . Much work remains for economically minded historians, as well as for historically minded economists and others in order to fill in this story and further consolidate an emerging picture that highlights the pivotal role that Africa and Africans played in launching Europe on its path to modernity and an economic divergence compared to other regions of the world that has only now begun to close. One of the most remarkable features of this history, however , is how slowly and reluctantly the academy has come to considering the crucial African contribution in the first place. In the decades that followed Britain’ s abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and for nearly the next century and a half, W estern attention toward Africa was broadly consumed with what Europe claimed to be its civilizing mission on the continent, of the “white man’ s burden.” It took a non-European, and a Black man from the West Indies at that, Eric W illiams, to turn traditional debates on their head, belatedly shifting them from a focus on the supposed great good that Europe has done for Africa to advancing the proposition that it was in fact the so-called Dark Continent, via Atlantic slavery , that provided the critical boost that had made Europe’s takeoff possible. Relatedly , and equally worthy of note, is the curious fact that in the half century that followed the 1944 publication of W illiams’s Capitalism and Slavery , Western scholars poured vastly more ener gy into attempts to find fault with or outright debunk his arguments than they had ever previously invested in considering the possibility that Africa and Africans had played an important role in the story of Europe in the first place. It is a credit to the fertility of Williams’ s ideas, though, that in the decades that followed scholars in fields as varied as dependency theory , Marxist history, British cultural studies, and postcolonial studies have continued to draw on his writings. One should also cite the ongoing Legacies of British Slave-Ownership project at University College London, which, drawing inspiration from W illiams, has identified the 47,000 Britons who claimed and received £20 million in compensation from their government after slave ownership in the British Caribbean was ended in 1833. This payout amounted to 40 percent of the government’s budget at the time, or the equivalent of roughly £17 billion today. In broadly dismissing W illiams’s critics, Pomeranz summarized some of their key objections to his ideas: Some deny that coer cion (i.e., slavery) allowed above-average profits in the first place. Others concede at least the possibility of above-normal pr ofits but argue that the accumulation of these profits was trivial compar ed to the accumulation of pr ofits from economic activity within Eur ope itself. And others point to . . . the relatively small capital r equirements of the early Industrial Revolution and ar gue that this makes whatever above-normal profits ther e might have been lar gely irrelevant to industrialization . Frames like these, however , miss what is most vital to understanding this history. The most important contribution of African slavery to the W est was not whatever fillip it may or may not have provided for industrialization, which even most sympathetic scholars today feel W illiams fundamentally miscast and overstated. ‡ Rather, it was something far lar ger and yet hiding in plain sight, something in fact that is indisputable: Africa, and the human resources drained from that continent via the greatest forced migration in human history , had provided the most essential input of all by far to making the New World economically viable. Africans, in other words, became the ingredient sine qua non in this vast project. Doubters must ask themselves, What would the European newcomers have done without them? But we needn’t await an answer. To a degree that has never been recognized, it was upon the bedrock of their strength and their will to endure and survive the horrors of slavery that much of the wealth and power of subsequent centuries of predominant Western capitalism was founded. The Atlantic world was not just made viable through their labor .

Yes, as we have claimed here, it was this appropriated toil that generated nearly all of the commodities and much of the gold and silver that helped fuel the ascension of the W est. But that is not all. Far from it. More important still, it was the very founding of this Atlantic world, an unprecedentedly large geographic sphere spanning four continents, that created what we now think of and understand as the W est, and this is what made the very greatness that we associate with this geographical notion possible. Without the Americas and their long and deep connections to Africa, what would Europe have weighed in the historical balance of the last half millennium? T o answer the question is to not only challenge our understanding of modern history , but to fundamentally reconsider W estern identity itself. What has most distinguished modern Europe from other regions of the world is not so much any qualities intrinsic to it, as cultural chauvinists and those who fixate on race profess, but rather the fact that its peoples spanned the Atlantic at a particularly opportune moment in time, utterly transforming life on every shore, thanks to the indispensable contribution of Africans. And in doing so, Europe was itself transformed as well, and not merely the agent of transformation as is often imagined. Later , we will further explore Africa’s essential hand in the invention and construction of this new creation we call the W est, paying particular attention to the American colonies that became the United States and to Haiti, the former plantation colony that—after the only successful lar ge slave revolt in world history—became the second republic in the Americas.

Before we arrive there, though, in the pages that follow we must first turn to the story of how these interactions impacted Africa, the overlooked cornerstone of our Atlantic world.

* One historian has gamely sought to affix numbers to this, estimating that by 1800 Britain was acquiring the output of a million slaves working in sugar , tobacco, and cotton alone, thereby effectively stealing 2.5 billion hours of labor from them. † The patterns noted by the MIT scholars would also hold up on the American mainland, where the greatest centers of economic growth and new wealth were precisely the places most directly connected to the slave-production-driven economic centers of the Atlantic world.

‡ W illiams has also been strongly refuted for his so-called decline theory , a thesis that held that Britain conceded an end to the slave trade and to slavery only because its empire in the Caribbean had ceased to be profitable. Historians like Seymour Drescher have convincingly shown this not to have been the case. Indeed, abolition in Britain followed on the heels of a particularly intensive period of slave trading, as well as the opening of ambitious new plantation sugar domains in Guyana.