If Africa was never behind, how did it become “behind”?

The answer lies not first in Africa, but in Europe.

Europe did not merely rise in power between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. It increasingly recast its rise as the direction of history itself.

As European states consolidated authority, expanded maritime capacity, and extended commercial networks beyond the Mediterranean, a growing strand of European political and intellectual thought began interpreting that trajectory as normative rather than particular.¹ The Renaissance was framed not simply as a regional revival but as the rebirth of civilization. The scientific revolution was narrated as the dawn of rationality. Political consolidation became evidence of maturity. Europe’s historical experience was elevated into a model.

This shift did not invent chronology. It transformed chronology into hierarchy.

European historiography increasingly described history as linear, progressive, and directional — moving from darkness to light, from superstition to reason, from fragmentation to unity.² Progress implied sequence. Sequence implied advancement. Advancement implied superiority.

Once history is imagined as a single forward-moving line, someone must stand ahead and someone must fall behind.

Europe placed itself at the front.

This move did not require hostility toward Africa. It required something subtler: the assumption that Europe represented the present — and even the future — of humanity.

Christian theology had long contained a fulfillment structure: promise and completion, old and new, shadow and substance.³ In sacred history, what comes later fulfills what came before. The new covenant supersedes the old; completion replaces preparation. Within theology, this structure concerned divine revelation.

Over time, that fulfillment structure provided conceptual habits that could be translated into civilizational thinking.

What comes later is fuller.What comes earlier is preparatory.What fulfills supersedes.

The migration from theological fulfillment to historical progress was not a single event but a gradual shift in intellectual framing. The language of providence gave way to the language of progress, but the structure of sequence remained. Later increasingly came to mean superior. Earlier increasingly came to mean incomplete.

Europe did not invent the idea of historical sequence; many civilizations have imagined themselves central to history. What distinguished Europe was the scale of its expanding power and its growing ability to globalize its interpretive framework.

As European maritime expansion accelerated in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, encounters with Africa were increasingly filtered through this developmental lens. These were not framed as meetings between contemporaneous civilizations, but as encounters between maturity and immaturity.

Africa became earlier.

Not geographically distant.Not merely culturally distinct.Earlier.

The irony is striking. Much of western Europe after the fall of Rome experienced fragmentation, shifting institutional capacity, and uneven urban continuity.⁴ Yet as European states stabilized and commercial networks expanded, that earlier experience was gradually universalized into a developmental stage through which “civilization” passes.

Europe’s past became the template for everyone else’s supposed present.

This is how Africa was moved in time.

Once Europe defined itself as the future, disagreement with European institutions could be interpreted as resistance to progress itself. If Europe embodied advancement, then to challenge European models could be cast as opposing development. If Europe represented rationality, dissent could be framed as irrationality.

History became moral alibi.

Sequencing alone does not justify domination. It prepares for it.

If a civilization is imagined as earlier in time, domination can be reframed as acceleration. Intervention can be narrated as guidance. Rule can be justified as development.

Elements of this sequencing logic were already in place before racial codification hardened and before plantation slavery reached its full scale in the Atlantic world.⁵ But once those racial systems crystallized, the temporal hierarchy made them appear coherent.

The language of progress masked the logic of hierarchy.

The metaphor of advancement concealed the assumption of superiority.

By the time European colonial expansion intensified, the intellectual groundwork had been laid. Africa was not merely different. It was “not yet.”

The prologue established that Africa was never behind.

This column shows how Europe made itself the future — and in doing so, created the conceptual conditions under which hierarchy could appear not as aggression, but as destiny.

The next column will examine how this sequencing hardened into a logic of replacement — how what comes later was not merely seen as newer, but as fuller, truer, and authorized to supersede what came before.

J.H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

J.H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

Jack Goody, The Theft of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Jack Goody, The Theft of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

R. Kendall Soulen, The God of Israel and Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996).

R. Kendall Soulen, The God of Israel and Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996).

Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400–1000 (New York: Penguin, 2009).

Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400–1000 (New York: Penguin, 2009).

David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966).

David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966).

Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966.

Elliott, J.H. Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

Goody, Jack. The Theft of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Soulen, R. Kendall. The God of Israel and Christian Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996.

Wickham, Chris. The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400–1000. New York: Penguin, 2009.

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