Howard W. French

Africa and the Making of the Modern World

Born in Blackness

Documents the burgeoning Chinese presence in Africa to examine China's potentially world-changing role in reshaping Africa's culture and economy.

How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa

China's Second Continent

An account of the consequences of the century-long encounter between Africa and the Western world contends that Africa's natural resources have been exploited by Western interests, considers the roles of the region's leaders, traces the outbreaks of AIDS and the Ebola virus, and analyzes genocidal activities in Rwanda and the Congo. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

The Tragedy and Hope of Africa

A Continent for the Taking

A book of the year for The National. An incisive investigation of China's ideological development as it becomes an ever more aggressive player in regional and global diplomacy. For many years after Deng Xiaoping initiated the economic reforms that began in 1978 and led to its overtaking the USA as the world's economic powerhouse, China maintained an attitude of false modesty about its ambitions. That diffidence has now been set aside. China has asserted its place among the global heavyweights, revealing its plans for pan-Asian geopolitical dominance by building up its navy, fabricating new islands to support its territorial claims in areas like the South China Sea, and diplomatically bullying smaller players. Underlying this shift in attitude is a strain of thinking that casts China's present-day actions in historical terms. China is now once more on the path to restoring the glories of its dynastic past. Howard W. French demonstrates that if we can understand how that historical identity informs current actions -- in ways ideological, philosophical, and even legal -- we can learn to forecast just what kind of global power China intends to become -- and to interact wisely with the superpower.

How the Past Helps Shape China's Push for Global Power

Everything Under the Heavens

Qiu Xiaolong

This book is a photographic exploration of life in the old and rapidly disappearing quarters of Shanghai, with accompanying poems and essays by the author of fiction and poetry, Qiu Xiaolong. The photographs, all taken in a documentary style over a period of five years, represent an intimate and invaluable visual natural history of a way of life in the workers’ quarters and other central districts of the city that held sway throughout the 20th century and into the early years of the 21st century, before yielding to the ambitious ongoing efforts at urban reconstruction. Mr. Qiu, whose best-known books are largely set in this old city, where his protagonist Inspector Chen walks around in investigations, is suited like few others to provide a lyrical accompanying text whose purpose is to celebrate the life, beauty and texture of this world before it has vanished altogether. No photographer has pursued this subject with more dedication and persistence than Mr. French, whose photographs of Shanghai have been exhibited on four continents. Taken together, the work of these two contributors offers compelling esthetics and lasting historical value for lovers of Shanghai, past, present and future.

Photographs and Poems of an Intimate Way of Life

Disappearing Shanghai

Howard B. French

An account of the consequences of the century-long encounter between Africa and the Western world contends that Africa's natural resources have been exploited by Western interests, considers the roles of the region's leaders, traces the outbreaks of AIDS and the Ebola virus, and analyzes genocidal activities in Rwanda and the Congo. 20,000 first printing.

Revealing the central yet intentionally obliterated role of Africa in the creation of modernity, Born in Blackness vitally reframes our understanding of world history. In a sweeping narrative that traverses 600 years, one that eloquently weaves precise historical detail with poignant personal reportage, Pulitzer Prize finalist Howard W. French retells the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the economic ascendancy of Europe, the anchoring of democracy in America, and the fulfillment of so-called Enlightenment ideals all grew out of Europe’s dehumanizing engagement with the “darkest” continent. Born in Blackness dramatically retrieves the lives of major African historical figures whose stories have been repeatedly etiolated and erased over centuries, from unimaginably rich medieval African emperors who traded with Asia; to Kongo sovereigns who heroically battled seventeenth-century European powers; to ex-slaves who liberated Haitians from bondage. In doing so, French tells the story of gold, tobacco, sugar, and cotton—and the greatest “commodity” of all, the millions of people brought in chains from Africa to the New World, whose reclaimed histories fundamentally help explain our present world.

Howard W. French

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