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Last Monday was Indigenous Peoples’ Day, although the sign at my local library still said “Columbus Day.” I was disappointed, but I wasn’t shocked that a library in South Carolina still refers to the second Monday in October as Columbus Day rather than Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Unfortunately, the myth of Columbus and the “Age of Discovery” is powerful in the United States. Even in many present-day world history textbooks and websites, writers and editors still describe the European voyages in the 1400s and 1500s as an “Age of Discovery” or an “Age of European Exploration.” These phrases aren’t neutral; they reflect a Eurocentric bias in our understanding of world history.

To help students think about the problem with using “discovery” or “exploration” to talk about Columbus or other European navigators, we can start with Columbus’ 1493 letter to the Spanish court reporting on his voyage. He wrote this letter on the journey back from the Americas to describe what had happened. The letter was reprinted and distributed across Europe in the following years. When students read this letter, I ask them to examine closely the first two sentences:

I have determined to write you this letter to inform you of everything that has been done and discovered in this voyage of mine. On the thirty-third day after leaving Cadiz I came into the Indian Sea, where I discovered many islands inhabited by numerous people.

Columbus himself twice used the word “discovered.” Some translators use “found” instead, which seems minor considering the rest of the quote. The “many islands” that Columbus “discovered” were “inhabited by numerous people.” How do we discover a place where many people already live? Columbus’ own words reveal his Eurocentrism. Even though he acknowledged that many people lived in the Caribbean Islands, their existence didn’t matter. He had “discovered” the islands. When we repeat Columbus’ claim that he “discovered” the Americas or that other Europeans, such as Vasco da Gama or Ferdinand Magellan “explored,” we are ignoring the millions of Indigenous Americans, Africans, and Asians who lived in these places before Europeans showed up.

In Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel, Shahnaz Habib, an Indian writer who grew up in Kerala, India (one of the places that Vasco da Gama is said to have “discovered” a route to), writes about her reaction to the notion that Europeans discovered places outside Europe:

People of color often use air quotes when we talk of explorers who “discovered” the Americas or India or various Pacific islands. Alas, it is hard to translate air quotes to text. Even when retranslated back as quote marks (see “discovered”), something is missing. My fingers often itch to include the eye-rolling and smirking that we use to accompany air quotes. I propose instead a new word: pseudiscovery. The silent p, I hope, will convey the silence of our air quotes, the people and places who were rendered invisible when Europeans pseudiscovered them.

Habib captures perfectly how people from the rest of the world feel about these persistent phrases. The “Age of Discovery” and the “Age of Exploration” are relics of a Eurocentric narrative of world history. Africans, Asians, and Indigenous peoples only mattered once Europeans discovered how to travel across the world’s oceans. When we use these phrases, we alienate the many students in our classes whose families come from the places Columbus, da Gama, and Magellan “discovered.” The next time we teach about these European navigators and their important voyages, let’s not call them discoveries or explorations. They were part of the Age of Maritime Navigation and Colonization.

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Hyphenating ethnicities has gone out of style, both figuratively and literally. All the major style guides recommend using “African Americans” or “Asian Americans” to describe groups of people. Hyphens suggest a sense of otherness. Removing hyphens encourages a sense of inclusion when talking about groups of people. Given this trend, it’s worth asking why so many world historians persist in writing “Afro-Eurasia”?

In the late twentieth century, many pioneers of modern world history advocated for seeing the historical integration of Africa, Asia, and Europe. They argued that instead of separating national or regional histories, we should focus on the long history of Africa, Asia, and Europe’s interconnectedness. Jerry Bentley and William McNeill promoted the idea of the “Old World.” Marshall Hodgson was one of the first to use “Afro-Eurasia.” Michael Pearson and Andre Gunter Frank suggested that “Afrasian” would be a better term, since it removes the hyphen. In the early 2000s, Ross Dunn oversaw the World History for Us All project, which used “Afroeurasia.”

Despite these earlier arguments about what to call the interconnected region of Africa, Asia, and Europe, Marshall Hodgson’s hyphenated “Afro-Eurasia” stuck. Open any world history textbook, except for Ross Dunn and Laura Mitchell’s Panorama: A World History, and you’ll find lots of hyphens. The CollegeBoard also uses the hyphenated form of “Afro-Eurasia” in its Course and Exam Description for Advanced Placement World History: Modern.

The idea of separating Africa from Eurasia doesn’t make sense when we survey thousands of years of how Afroeurasians understood their geography. Around 500 B.C.E., Hecataeus of Miletus, a Greek living under Persian rule, produced one of the oldest known maps of the world. Hecataeus depicted northern Africa as part of Asia. In the second century C.E., Ptolemy expanded Hecataeus’ map to include more of Africa, Asia, and Europe. Despite the differences in their maps, both geographers presented a single world in which Africa, Asia, and Europe were connected.

The famous geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi, born in Ceuta in North Africa, produced a world map in the twelfth century at the court of Roger II of Sicily. While he adopted a style similar to Hecataeus, he “flipped” the map. Africa was on top! The German geographer Henricus Martellus Germanus made a world map in the fifteenth century, while he was in Florence. Europe was at the top, but the same basic design would have looked familiar.

Even if we jump to the other side of Afroeurasia, we can find maps showing Afroeurasia as a single world. In the late fifteenth century, Ming Dynasty scholars produced the Da Ming Hunyi Tu map showing Afrouerasia from Japan to Africa as part of a large single landmass. In the early fifteenth century, Korean geographers Kwon Kun and Yi Hoe made the Gangnido map. They most likely copied the Chinese map. While they vastly underestimated the size of Africa, Afroeurasia was a large, connected landmass.

If people across Afroeurasia imagined Africa, Asia, and Europe as part of a single landmass for 2,000 years, what prompted the hyphen? An obvious turning point might have been Columbus. In the 1500s, Europeans began colonizing and mapping the Americas, but that didn’t change how Europeans imagined Afroeurasia. Sixteenth and seventeenth-century maps continued to present a singular Afroeurasia.

To find the origin of the hyphen, we need to look to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the era of New Imperialism. During the 1800s, Europeans developed Social Darwinism to assert their “natural” racial superiority over others and justify conquering Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Islands. Europeans also employed cartography and geography in the service of imperialism. The rapid spread of European imperialism across Africa and Asia, in turn, shaped how Europeans mapped the world and understood themselves as a race.

The idea of hyphenated Afro-Eurasia seems to originate with the British geographer Halford Mackinder at the London School of Economics and a Conservative member of Parliament. In 1904, he wrote “The Geographical Pivot of History.” He argued that Asia and Europe had long been connected as “Euro-Asia,” and that Asian “hordes” had repeatedly attempted to “invade” Europe. The final “invasion” was the Mongols in the 1200s. Mackinder argued that after the Mongols, European civilization developed. He even claimed that “European civilization is, in a very real sense, the outcome of the secular struggle against Asiatic invasion.” Mackinder clearly understood that Asia and Europe had a long history, which he couldn’t pretend didn’t influence Europe’s development. He hyphenated the two continents to emphasize their otherness while acknowledging their connection. Over time, Mackinder’s “Euro-Asia” became “Eurasia.”

But where does Africa fit in? In the same paper, Mackinder clearly expressed his thoughts about Africa:

The full meaning of Asiatic influence upon Europe is not, however, discernible until we come to the Mongol invasions of the fifteenth century; but before we analyze the essential facts concerning these, it is desirable to shift our geographical view-point from Europe, so that we may consider the Old World in its entirety. It is obvious that, since the rainfall is derived from the sea, the heart of the greatest land-mass is likely to be relatively dry. We are not, therefore, surprised to find that two-thirds of all the world’s population is concentrated in relatively small areas along the margins of the great continent— in Europe, beside the Atlantic ocean; in the Indies and China, beside the Indian and Pacific oceans. A vast belt of almost uninhabited, because practically rainless, land extends as the Sahara completely across Northern Africa into Arabia. Central and Southern Africa were almost as completely severed from Europe and Asia throughout the greater part of history as were the Americas and Australia. In fact, the southern boundary of Europe was and is the Sahara rather than the Mediterranean, for it is the desert which divides the black man from the white. The continuous land-mass of Euro-Asia thus included between the ocean and the desert measures 21,000,000 square miles, or half of all the land on the globe, if we exclude from reckoning the deserts of Sahara and Arabia.

Mackinder acknowledged the existence of the “Old World,” but separated Africa from “Euro-Asia.” Mackinder’s Europe also included North Africa and stopped at the Sahara Desert, “which divides the black man from the white.” Africa was part of the “Old World,” but was also separate. Mackinder’s racism shaped his geographical understanding of Afroeurasia.

When we use hyphenated Afro-Eurasia, we emphasize Africa’s otherness from an integrated Eurasia. As world historians, we know that’s historically inaccurate. Africa south of the Sahara played a critical role in Afroeurasian exchange for centuries. Trans-Saharan caravans and Indian Ocean ships closely connected West Africa and East Africa to the rest of Afroeurasia. We all know it’s problematic to hyphenate people. It’s now time to stop hyphenating “Afro-Eurasia” and start emphasizing the interconnectedness of Afroeurasia.

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I appreciate all the thoughtful feedback I received on my previous post on the causes of the Haitian Revolution. A few folks asked where the images came from, and I want to highlight that they all come from Rocky Cotard and Laurent Dubois’ “The Slave Revolution That Gave Birth to Haiti.” You can read the original graphic history on the Nibor download PDF versions in English, Haitian Creole, or Portuguese. That question also reminded me that more folks should be aware of the significance of the Haitian Revolution. In this post, I’ll highlight five excellent resources for teaching or learning about the Haitian Revolution.

Laurent Dubois’ Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution is the best narrative history of the revolution. He balances the complexities of an academic monograph with the accessibility of a popular narrative. Dubois brings to life all the inspiring individuals who collectively abolished slavery in eighteenth-century France’s wealthiest colony and won their political independence.

To get a taste of Dubois’ storytelling and the revolution’s significance, check out “Why Haiti Should Be at the Centre of the Age of Revolution.” Most people are familiar with the significance of the American and French revolutions, but Haiti isn’t usually the first revolution people think about. Not only was it the only successful modern revolt by enslaved people, it was also the most radical of the Atlantic Revolutions. It was more than just a political revolution; it was also an economic and social revolution. Dubois explains how the Haitian Revolution “was both a local and a global event, a true world-historical moment in ways that are increasingly acknowledged today.”

Part of the reason I love using Rocky Cotard’s illustrations is that he’s Haitian-American. He regularly returns to Haiti and describes his art as bridging both cultures. We must pay attention to who produced the illustrations of the Haitian Revolution. In “All the Devils Are Here,”Marlene Daut discusses how many artists misrepresented the Haitian Revolution. White Europeans produced many historical images of the Haitian Revolution. They regularly depicted Haitian violence but rarely provided context or depicted White European violence. These images perpetuated a stereotype of Haitians as inherently violent and obscured the long history of White European violence against enslaved Africans.

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Daut also commissioned a series of articles on the 220th anniversary of Haitian independence for Public Books. Some leading scholars on Haiti contributed essays exploring different aspects and legacies of the revolution. All the essays are engaging and explore how the Haitian Revolution is still relevant today. Leslie Alexander’s “The U.S. Has Never Forgiven Haiti” is especially important for Americans. She discusses how Haiti inspired abolitionists and African-Americans. American governments during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries resented Haitian independence and undermined the country’s viability.

Despite Haitians winning their independence from France in 1804, many French governments did not let go of Haiti. The French refused to recognize Haiti’s independence or use the new name for the country; the French persisted in referring to Haiti as Saint-Domingue. In 1825, the French threatened to reoccupy Haiti unless Haitians paid a massive indemnity of 150 million francs. France demanded this amount in exchange for recognition of independence. Even though the Haitian government couldn’t afford to pay the indemnity, it felt compelled to take out loans. Economists estimate that the debt on those loans was not paid off until 1947. Marlene Daut’s “When France Extorted Haiti: The Greatest Heist in History” tells the story of the indemnity. The New York Times also published “Haiti’s Lost Billions: The Ransom.”Popular media often describes Haiti as the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. We can only understand the reasons for that misleading claim when we understand what France did to Haiti.

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If you want to learn more about the Haitian Revolution, I’ve written extensively about Haiti on Liberating Narratives. “‘We Have Dared to be Free’: Teaching the Haitian Revolution” is a good starting point.

Liberating Narratives is written by Bram Hubbell. If you’ve valued reading this post, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your financial contribution supports independent, advertising-free materials for teachers. Thank you, friends.

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Hundreds of thousands of teenagers worldwide take the AP World History test every May. Students can demonstrate what they’ve learned about important moments in world history. The American (North American), French, Haitian, and Latin American Revolutions, which textbooks call the Atlantic Revolutions, are one of those topics. This roughly fifty-year period appears not only in the AP World History framework but also in many state curricula. For most American students, learning about the Atlantic Revolutions is often the only time they learn anything about Haiti.

Many Americans are unfamiliar with Haiti’s history. When Haiti shows up in the media, it’s because of a political crisis or a natural disaster. It’s actually a good thing they learn about the Haitian Revolution as part of the Atlantic Revolutions. The Haitian Revolution was easily the most radical of the Atlantic Revolutions. It was the only successful revolution by enslaved Africans that led to the permanent abolition of slavery. Despite its significance, I regularly taught many high school students who were surprised by and had never heard of the Haitian Revolution.

The drawback to teaching the Haitian Revolution within the context of the Atlantic Revolutions is that it frequently leads to many students and teachers misunderstanding the causes of the Haitian Revolution. Students frequently claim that enslaved Africans revolted because they learned about European Enlightenment values. It’s a bit problematic to think that enslaved Africans in the French colony of Saint-Domingue revolted because the same Europeans who enslaved Africans also taught them the values of freedom and liberty that inspired a revolution.

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It doesn’t help that many popular world history textbooks reinforce this idea. In Ways of the World, Robert Strayer and Eric Nelson claim:

The Atlantic basin had become a world of intellectual and cultural exchange… The ideas that animated the Atlantic revolutions derived from the European Enlightenment and were shared across the ocean in newspapers, books, and pamphlets. At the heart of these ideas was the radical notion that human political and social arrangements could be engineered, and improved, by human action.

European Enlightenment ideas did circulate in the Atlantic World, but so did African ideas. Europeans didn’t have a monopoly on the concept of liberty. The vast majority of enslaved Africans in Saint-Domingue were born in Africa and had been captured in wars between rival African states. The enslaved Africans didn’t need to read John Locke to learn about liberty; they had experienced the loss of it firsthand when they were enslaved in Africa and sold to European slavers along the coast.

Another problematic claim is that the enslaved Africans revolted in 1791 because they saw other people revolt. In Traditions and Encounters, the authors point to the American and French Revolutions as the reason enslaved Africans revolted:

The success of the American revolution appealed not only to French social reformers but also to enslaved people and free people of color in the Caribbean. But on the French portion of the island of Hispaniola it was the French revolution that provided the immediate inspiration and the opportunity for the revolution that broke out there in 1791.

While Whites and free people of color on Saint-Domingue might have been inspired to push for more rights after seeing what happened in the United States and France, enslaved Africans on Saint-Domingue already knew how to revolt and fight back against their enslavement. For at least thirty years before the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution, enslaved Africans regularly resisted in various ways. In A Secret among the Blacks: Slave Resistance before the Haitian Revolution, John Garrigus describes how enslaved Africans practiced different forms of cultural resistance and engaged in work stoppages on plantations. Crystal Eddins has written about the long history of marronage among enslaved Africans on Saint-Domingue. They resisted by liberating themselves. They escaped from the brutality of the plantations and established their own communities across the island. Enslaved Africans didn’t need to see wealthy White American landowners or the French Third Estate revolt to become inspired to resist. By simply surviving, establishing maroon communities, and preserving their culture, enslaved Africans on Saint-Domingue had lived a life of resistance.

If the Enlightenment didn’t cause enslaved Africans to revolt, what did? It’s surprisingly simple, but the answer is probably not the one many people want to hear. Enslaved Africans revolted because European plantation slavery was more violent and brutal than we would like to admit. In just over a century, the French imported at least 800,000 enslaved Africans to Saint-Domingue; at the start of the Haitian Revolution, there were about 500,000 enslaved Africans. Some died natural deaths, but many were worked to death on plantations. Plantation managers regularly tortured enslaved Africans to keep them working.

In the early 1780s, Girod de Chantrans was a European living in Saint-Domingue. He described the willingness of plantation managers and owners to use violence:

Although nowadays Saint Domingue’s planters cannot fairly be accused of killing their slaves for pleasure, they do commonly commit acts of cruelty that do not kill, which they hope will reinforce discipline. Note also that most people in charge of properties are not their owners, and it matters little to them if a slave lives or dies, providing their salaries are paid…

Chantrans further described enslaved Africans working on a sugar plantation:

There were a hundred men and women of different ages. They were all digging ditches in a field of cane; most were naked or covered in rags. The sun beat down on their heads and sweat ran all over their bodies. Tired by the heat and the weight of their pickaxes, and by a heavy soil baked hard enough to break their tools, they made great efforts to overcome every obstacle. A gloomy silence reigned among them; pain was visible on every face, but the hour of rest never came. The manager watched the workgang without pity, and several slave drivers armed with long whips, mixed in among the workers, dealt out harsh blows from time to time even to those who were obliged by weariness to slow down—men and women, young and old, without distinction.

When we read about the violence on plantations in the Americas, it’s easy to understand what caused or inspired enslaved Africans to revolt. Enlightenment ideas didn’t cause enslaved Africans to revolt; they revolted because the system Europeans created was more horrific than we want to imagine.

On the night of Sunday, August 21, Dutty Boukman and the other enslaved Africans who started the Haitian Revolution gathered at Bois-Caïman to participate in a West African ritual that involved the slaughter of a pig, whose blood the participants drank. This act bonded the community together as they prepared to launch their insurgency. The Haitian Revolution began the next night. The enslaved Africans who started the Haitian Revolution didn’t invoke John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, or the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. They drew on their shared African heritage.

During the next thirteen years, the Haitian Revolution took many turns. French forces killed Dutty Boukman less than three months after Bois-Caïman. Other revolutionaries, such as Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, emerged as leaders. These leaders, at times, invoked principles associated with the Enlightenment, but they were not the leaders who started the revolution. They also regularly justified their revolution by pointing to French violence. When we claim that the Enlightenment or White Europeans inspired or caused the Haitian Revolution, we obscure the main reasons enslaved Africans revolted and how they understood their actions. For the Haitian revolutionaries, the revolution was rooted in their own experiences and traditions.

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All the illustrations come from Rocky Cotard and Laurent Dubois’ “The Slave Revolution That Gave Birth to Haiti,” a graphic history of the Haitian Revolution.

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