## Introduction: North Africa in the relational vortex of modernity  
The conventional Eurocentric story of the origins of modernity, and its entire racial epistemology, is generally decontextualized and stripped of its relationality with North African cultures and civilizations and the entire world system to which said cultures and civilizations were fused. Just as Walter Rodney encapsulated both relationality and agency in the title of his landmark volume How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), the emergence of white, Christian Europe and its hegemonic Western epistemology must be approached relationally, and with attention to agency and power (Césaire, 1955; Diop, 1987; Du Bois, 1935 [1992]; Fanon, 1966; Said, 1978). North Africa was far more central to the rise of the fundamental concepts of modernity and their development and proliferation than most narratives concede. The cultures, societies and States of northern Africa were historically important and deserve renewed attention in their own right (Carew, 1995). In relation to nascent European city-States, they represented one of several key conduits of social and economic connection into a worldwide system of contiguous regions and civilizations encompassing all of Africa and Asia and beyond: in other words, the 'Old World'.