British American Tobacco, one of the United Kingdom’s largest companies, has been accused of paying bribes to the former president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe. The allegations come amid other reports of Western multinational corporations allegedly engaging in questionable conduct while operating on the African continent.

This week on the Trend Lines podcast, Howard French joins WPR’s Judah Grunstein to discuss his latest book, “Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War,” which restores Africa and Africans to their proper place of centrality in the history of Europe’s rise to global dominance.