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Built on the bodies of slaves, how Africa was erased from the history of the modern world,

by Howard W. French, read by Dermott Daly and produced by Esther Apocugeni.

It would be unusual for a story that begins in the wrong place to arrive at the right conclusions.

And so it is with the history of how the modern world was made.

Traditional accounts have accorded a primacy to Europe's 15th century age of discovery

and to the maritime connection it established between West and East.

Paired with this historic feat is the momentous if accidental discovery of what came to be known

as the New World. Other explanations for the emergence of the modern world reside in the ethics

and temperament that some associate with Judeo-Christian beliefs, or with the development and spread

of the scientific method, or more chauvinistically still, with Europeans professed belief in their

unique ingenuity and inventiveness. In the popular imagination, these ideas have become associated

with the work ethic, individualism, an entrepreneurial drive that supposedly flowed from the Protestant

Reformation in places such as England and Holland. Of course, there is no denying the significance

of the voyages of mariners such as Vasco de Gamma, who reached India via the Indian Ocean in 1498.

Ferdinand Magellan, who travelled west to Asia, skirting the southern tip of South America

and Christopher Columbus. As the author Marie Arana has elegantly said of Columbus,

when he sailed west, he had been a medieval man from a medieval world,

surrounded by medieval notions about Cyclops, Pygmy's, Amazon's, dog-faced natives,

...