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It was this moment, when Europe and what is nowadays styled sub-Saharan Africa came into permanent deep contact, that laid the foundations of the modern age.

It is not that the basic facts are unknown; it is that they have been siloed, overlooked or swept into dark corners. It is essential to restore key chapters such as these to their proper place of prominence in our common narrative of modernity.

The rise of Europe was not founded on any innate or permanent characteristics that produced superiority. To a degree that remains unrecognised, it was built on Europe’s economic and political relations with Africa. The heart of the matter here, of course, was the massive, centuries-long transatlantic trade in enslaved people who were put to work growing sugar, tobacco, cotton and other cash crops on the plantations of the New World.

The long thread that leads us to the present began in those three decades at the end of the 15th century, when commerce blossomed between Portugal and Africa, sending a newfound prosperity washing over what had previously been a marginal European country. It drove urbanisation in Portugal on an unprecedented scale, and created new identities that gradually freed many people from feudal ties to the land. One of these novel identities was nationhood, whose origins were bound up in questing for wealth in faraway lands, and soon thereafter in emigration and colonisation in the tropics.

understanding that the world was infinite in its social complexity, and this required a broadening of consciousness, even amid the colossal violence and horror that accompanied this process, and an ever more systematic unmooring from provincialism

Portugal overwhelmingly dominated Europe’s trade in Africans, and slavery was beginning to rival gold as Portugal’s most lucrative source of African bounty. By then, it was already on its way to becoming the foundation of a new economic system based on plantation agriculture. Over time, that system would generate far more wealth for Europe than African gold or Asian silks and spices.

Malachy Postlethwayt, a leading 18th-century British expert on commerce, called the rents and revenues of plantation slave labour “the fundamental prop and support” of his country’s prosperity. He described the British empire as “a magnificent superstructure of American commerce and naval power [built] on an African foundation”. Around the same time, an equally prominent French thinker, Guillaume-Thomas-François de Raynal, described Europe’s plantations worked by African enslaved people as “the principal cause of the rapid motion which now agitates the universe”. Daniel Defoe, the English author of Robinson Crusoe, but also a trader, pamphleteer and spy, bested both when he wrote: “No African trade, no negroes; no negroes, no sugars, gingers, indicoes [sic] etc; no sugar etc, no islands, no continent; no continent, no trade.”

Without African peoples trafficked from its shores, the Americas would have counted for little in the ascendance of the west. African labour, in the form of enslaved people, was what made the very development of the Americas possible. Without it, Europe’s colonial projects in the New World are unimaginable.

Through the development of plantation agriculture and a succession of history-altering commercial crops – tobacco, coffee, cacao, indigo, rice and, above all, sugar – Europe’s deep and often brutal ties with Africa drove the birth of a truly global capitalist economy

In sugar’s wake, cotton grown by enslaved people in the American south helped launch formal industrialisation, along with a second wave of consumerism. Abundant and varied clothing for the masses became a reality for the first time in human history

Spain and Portugal waged fierce naval battles in west Africa over access to gold. Holland and Portugal, then unified with Spain, fought something little short of a world war in the 17th century in present-day Congo and Angola, vying for control of trade in the richest sources of enslaved people in Africa. On the far side of the Atlantic, Brazil – the biggest producer of slave-grown sugar in the early 17th century – was caught up in this same struggle, and repeatedly changed hands. Later in that same century, England fought Spain over control of the Caribbean.

By the mid-1660s, just three decades or so after England initiated an African slave-labour model for its plantations there – one that was first implemented in the Portuguese colony of São Tomé little more than a century earlier – sugar from Barbados was worth more than the metal exports of all of Spanish America.

Nowadays, the consensus estimate on the numbers of Africans brought to the Americas hovers about 12 million. Lost in this atrocious but far too neat accounting is the likelihood that another 6 million Africans were killed in or near their homelands during the hunt for slaves, before they could be placed in chains. Estimates vary, but between 5% and 40% perished during brutal overland treks to the coast, or while being held, often for months, in barracoons, or holding pens, as they awaited embarkation on slave ships. And another 10% of those who were taken aboard died at sea during an Atlantic transit that constituted an extreme physical and psychological test for all those who were subjected to it. When one considers that Africa’s total population in the mid-19th century was probably about 100 million, one begins to gauge the enormity of the demographic assault that the slave trade represented.

It is often remarked that Africans themselves sold enslaved people to Europeans. What is less well known is that in many parts of Africa, such as the Kingdom of Kongo and Benin, Africans fought to end the trade in human beings once they understood its full impact on their own societies

Specialists aside, few imagine that islands like Barbados and Jamaica were far more important in their day than were the English colonies that would become the United States. The nation now known as Haiti most of all. In the 18th century it became the richest colony in history, and in the 19th, by dint of its slave population’s successful revolution, Haiti rivalled the US in terms of its influence on the world, notably in helping fulfil the most fundamental Enlightenment value of all: ending slavery.

My biggest surprise came in Barbados, whose slave-produced sugar, arguably more than any other place on earth, helped seal England’s ascension in the 17th century. I visited the island not long ago, determined to find as many traces of this legacy as possible, only to discover how thoroughly they had been hidden or effaced. Among my top priorities was to visit one of the largest slave cemeteries anywhere in the hemisphere, which included the excavated remains of nearly 600 people. It took me several attempts just to find the cemetery, which had no signage from any public road. Few local residents seemed aware of its historical importance, or even of its existence.

Nearly a century ago, WEB Du Bois had already affirmed much of what we needed to know on this topic. “It was black labour that established the modern world commerce, which began first as a commerce in the bodies of the slaves themselves,” he wrote. Now is the time to finally acknowledge this.

Nature would serve as the canvas, the prize, and the victim of colonialist dreams

Nature narrates the colonial story, through its vast mines, its desecrated rivers, and emaciated territories

Colonies were arranged to maximize and facilitate extraction. Profit was the compass. French colonial planners divided ‘useful Africa’ from ‘useless Africa’ (8). Lands were surveyed, zoned, parcelled, and mapped. All these endeavours relied on a narrative of emptiness, of nothingness.

vacant fields, lands of nobody, terra nullius

The fiction of negation, and discovery, was used to justify the clearance of native habitats and inhabitants

In 1905, communities living in the German-controlled Tanganyika (now part of Tanzania) revolted against policy forcing them to grow cotton for export. In response, as historian John Reader recalls: ‘three columns advanced through the region, pursuing a scorched earth policy – creating famine. People were forced from their homes, villages were burned to the ground; food crops that could not be taken way or given to loyal groups were destroyed’ (11). Around 300,000 people would perish.

Communal water management techniques were replaced with enormous works of engineering and state regulation

Traditional pastoralist practices were framed as outdated, damaging and ineffective. French July Monarchy propagandists used Arab desertification of Algerian land as a justification for conquest: once in control, France would restore ecological order and change the climate

Perhaps the most destructive agrarian practice involved sugar

In the Americas, millions of hectares were stripped of forest life and burned to allow for massive cane plantations, accelerating soil erosion. In the West Indies and Guyana, rainforests were demolished to make way for sugarcane cultivation. Haiti, whose name means ‘green island’ in Arawak, was stripped of trees

The logic of sugar’s monoculture was applied to a variety of commodities. The peripheries of the Amazon were cleared for coffee plantations. Using forced labour, Southeast Asia, southern Colombia and the Congo were deforested and converted into rubber plantations. Burma and Thailand saw their forests turned to mass ricefields, while Indian ecosystems were felled to make way cotton plantations.

soils were exhausted and made sterile, degraded by deforestation and monoculture

As historian Corey Ross recalls: ‘One of the recurring themes in the history of plantations is the perennial cycle of boom and bust. Whether the crop is sugar, tobacco, or cotton, the basic pattern is often the same: an initial frenzy of clearing and planting is followed by either a precipitous collapse of production or a gradual process of creeping decline before eventually ending in soil exhaustion, abandonment, and relocation elsewhere’

Since there was always more land to conquer and acquire, sustainability was irrelevant. The model was simple: exhaust the land, abandon it and clear new land

From territory to territory, life was swept away. Entire animal species were decimated through overhunting. The demand from European elites for fine furs drove hunters and trappers into Siberia and the Americas, carving open new frontiers. John Astor, founder of the American Fur Company, became the first multimillionaire in US history (21). Fishing fleets scoured the seas, slaughtering shoals. In less than 30 years, sea cows were harpooned into oblivion across the Bering Strait (22). Quaggas, thylacines, great auks, passenger pigeons, warrahs and hundreds of other species disappeared within decades. Industrial whaling, driven by demand for blubber, culled whales to the edge of extinction, removing all bowhead whales from the Beaufort Sea

The eradication and exploitation of nature was conjoined with the eradication and exploitation of peoples

In the colonial realm, nature and those deemed inferior enough to be part of it, had to be removed or put to work

In fact, the Peace of Westphalia strengthened a system of relations that was precisely not based on the concept of the sovereign state but instead on a reassertion of the Holy Roman Empire’s complex jurisdictional arrangements (landeshoheit), which allowed autonomous political units to form a broader conglomerate (the “empire”) without a central government.  

What we have come to call the Peace of Westphalia actually designates two treaties: signed between May and October 1648, they were agreements between the Holy Roman Empire and its two main opponents, France (the Treaty of Münster) and Sweden (the Treaty of Osnabrück). Each treaty mostly addressed the internal affairs of the Holy Roman Empire and smaller bilateral exchanges of territory with France and with Sweden.

The treaties were only properly mythologized in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when European historians turned to the early modern period in order to craft stories that served their own worldview.

Looking for a story of states fighting for their sovereignty against imperial domination, nineteenth-century historians found exactly what they needed in the anti-Habsburg fabrications that had been disseminated by the French and Swedish crowns during the Thirty Years’ War

Leo Gross’s essay “The Peace of Westphalia: 1648–1948,” published in 1948 in the American Journal of International Law. Canonized as “timeless” and “seminal” at the time, the article gave meaning to the emerging postwar order. By comparing the 1945 UN Charter to the Peace of Westphalia, Gross rehashed a story about treaties for freedom, equality, non-intervention, and all the rest of the alleged virtues for reinventing national sovereignty

The solution to the Westphalia debacle, then, would seem to lie in putting forward an alternative narrative grounded in greater historical accuracy, one that reflects the much more complicated process through which the modern international order came about.

Until the nineteenth century, the international order was made up of a patchwork of polities. Although a distinction is often made between the European continent and the rest of the world, recent research has reminded us that European polities also remained remarkably heterogeneous until the nineteenth century. While some of these were sovereign states, others included composite formations such as the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, within which sovereignty was divided in very complex ways.

Sovereign statehood only became the default within Europe in the nineteenth century, with entities like the Holy Roman Empire gradually giving way to sovereign states like Germany. While often overlooked in this regard, Latin America also transitioned into a system of sovereign states during that period as a result of its successive anti-colonial revolutions.

an international system in which power is shared among different kinds of actors might in fact be relatively stable

As late as 1800, Europe east of the French border looked nothing like its contemporary iteration. As historian Peter H. Wilson describes in his recent book Heart of Europe (2020), the Holy Roman Empire, long snubbed by historians of the nation-state, had been in existence for a thousand years at that point; at its peak it had occupied a third of continental Europe. It would hold on for six more years, until its dissolution under the strain of Napoleonic invasions and its temporary replacement with the French-dominated Confederation of the Rhine (1806–1813) and then the German Confederation (1815–1866).

what we think of as modern-day Italy was still a patchwork of kingdoms (Sardinia, the Two Siciles, Lombardy-Venetia under the Austrian Crown), Duchies (including Parma, Modena, and Tuscany), and Papal States, while territory further east was ruled by the Ottoman Empire.

We are accustomed to thinking of Europe as the first historical instance of a full-blown system of sovereign states, but Latin America actually moved toward that form of political organization at just about the same time. After three centuries of imperial domination, the region saw a complete redrawing of its political geography in the wake of the Atlantic Revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Following in the footsteps of the United States (1776) and Haiti (1804), it witnessed a series of wars of independence which, by 1826 and with only a few exceptions, had essentially booted out the Spanish and Portuguese empires. Of course, Britain promptly gained control of trade in the region through an aggressive combination of diplomatic and economic measures often referred to as “informal empire,” but its interactions were now with formally sovereign states.

Over the last two decades, scholars working on the history of the global order have painstakingly shown the complete mismatch between the story of Westphalia and the historical evidence. The nation-state is not so old as we are often told, nor has it come to be quite so naturally. Getting this history right means telling a different story about where our international political order has come from—which in turn points the way to an alternative future.

Until World War II the world was still dominated by empires and the heterogeneous structures of political authority they had created. Once decolonization took off after 1945, the nation-state was not the only option on the table. In Worldmaking after Empire (2019), Adom Getachew describes anglophone Africa’s “federal moment,” when the leaders of various independence movements on the continent discussed the possibility of organizing a regional Union of African States and, in the Caribbean, a West Indian Federation.

“antinationalist anticolonialism” eventually ran afoul of the French government’s unwillingness to distribute the metropole’s resources amongst a widened network of citizens. Yet the fact that it was seriously considered should give us pause. Of course, in the context of decolonization, the triumph of the nation-state represented a final victory for colonized peoples against their long-time oppressors. But it also disconnected regions with a shared history, and it created its own patterns of oppression, particularly for those who were denied a state of their own: indigenous peoples, stateless nations, minorities

what is clear is that a mere seventy years ago, what we now consider to be the self-evident way of organizing political communities was still just one of the options available to our collective imagination

The conventional narrative associates international order with the existence of a system of sovereign states, but the alternative story suggests that the post-1648 period was characterized by the resilience of a diversity of polities

The comparative stability of the post-1648 period may therefore have had more to do with the continued diversity of polities on the continent than with the putative emergence of a homogenous system of sovereign states

much as with Western Europe, the region did not stabilize into a system of nation-states that looks like its contemporary iteration until the end of the nineteenth century. It now seems possible to tell a relatively similar story about North America, as in historian Rachel St John’s ongoing project, The Imagined States of America: The Unmanifest History of Nineteenth-century North America.

even the most powerful contemporary multinational corporations—Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, and the rest—are drastically more limited in their formal powers than were the famous mercantile companies who were central actors in the international order until the mid-nineteenth century. The two largest, the British and the Dutch East India Companies, founded in 1600 and 1602 respectively, amassed spectacular amounts of power over their two-hundred-year existence, becoming the primary engine of European imperial expansion. While these companies started off as merchant enterprises seeking to get in on Asia’s lucrative trading network, they gradually turned into much more ambitious endeavors and grew from their original outposts in India and Indonesia into full-on polities of their own. They were, as various scholars now argue, “company-states”—hybrid public-private actors that were legally entitled to rule over subjects, mint money, and wage wars. From this perspective, contemporary non-state actors are still relatively weak compared to states, who still monopolize far more formal power than all other actors in the international system

we should be careful not to suggest that the culprit is an unprecedented weakening of the state and thus that the solution is to expand state power

States certainly were important after 1648, but so were a host of other actors, from mercantile companies to semi-sovereign polities and all sorts of empires more or less formally structured. This system only truly began to unravel in the nineteenth century, with many of its features persisting well into the twentieth. Viewed through this lens, the so-called “Westphalian order” begins to look much more like an anomaly than the status quo

Engaging with this history makes the current centrality of the states-system as a basis for organizing the globe look recent and in fairly good shape, not centuries-old and on the verge of collapse

What is truly new, from a longue durée perspective, is the triumph of the state worldwide, and our inability to think of ways of organizing the world that do not involve either nation-states or organizations of nation-states.

Even thinkers in tune with limitations of the nation-state cannot seem to free themselves from the statist straitjacket of the contemporary political imagination. Debates about state-based supranational institutions likewise fall along a remarkably narrow spectrum: more power to states, or more power to state-based international organizations?

Misrepresenting the history of the states-system plays into the hands of nationalist strongmen, who depict themselves as saving the world from a descent into stateless anarchy, controlled by globalist corporations who couldn’t care less about national allegiance. More broadly, getting this history right means having the right conversations. Giving power to actors other than states is not always a good idea, but we must resist the false choice between resurgent nationalism on the one hand and the triumph of undemocratic entities on the other.

Today the norm is that states enjoy far more rights than any other collectivity—ranging from indigenous peoples to transnational social movements—simply because they are states. But it is not at all clear why this should be the only framework available to our collective imagination, particularly if its legitimacy rests on a history of the states-system that has long been debunked.