The Commission for Africa, which reported in March 2005, drew attention to the enduring problem of poverty in Africa, but also reinforced the common perception that Africa has a troubled relationship with the ‘modern world’. This essay reviews the literature on Africa's long-term political and economic development, paying particular attention to the continent's insertion into the global system in the period described by C. A. Bayly as the ‘birth of the modern world’. It concludes that, though many of the continent's current problems arise out of recent policy failures, we should not ignore longer-term, structural elements of environmental, demographic and economic history, including the consequences (direct and indirect) of the slave trade.