Community hub
Recent from talks
Knowledge base stats:
Talk channels stats:
Members stats:
African Dominion
African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa, by Michael A. Gomez, focuses on the regions surrounding the Middle Niger Valley. It can be thought of as tracing the rise and fall of empire as a form of local political organization in West Africa, culminating in the Songhay Empire; thus it primarily covers the millennium from the mid-sixth century to 1591 CE, when Songhay came under Moroccan rule. It has been particularly noted for using a wide range of non-European sources, particularly Arabic-language material, to develop a non-Eurocentric account of medieval West African history.
The book was the subject of the first "review round table" to be published by The American Historical Review, in which four different reviews of the book were published in the same volume, along with a response from the author. Another round table discussing the book was held during the November 2019 African Studies Association conference, where discussants were Bruce Hall, Chouki El Hamel, Ousmane Kane and Jan Jansen; the Association awarded the book the ASA Best Book Prize in the same year. The book also won the 2019 American Historical Association Martin A. Klein Prize in African History.
The book comprises fourteen chapters, plus a prologue and epilogue.
Chapter 1, "The Middle Niger in Pre-antiquity and Global Context", argues that the academic discipline of World History has overlooked Africa; the chapter instead presents the Middle Niger region as one whose history is an important component of the medieval World System through its interactions with North Africa and the Middle East.
Concisely surveying prehistory back to around 7000 BCE, the chapter presents the region "as an archetypical riverain geopolitical core for the complex panoply of events to follow", and takes its story to the emergence of the Ghana Empire around 300 CE.
Chapter 2, "Early Gao", challenges an existing grand narrative that has presented a succession of three empires: Ghana, Mali and Songhay. While agreeing with much past research on Gao, Gomez argues that the Gao Empire was more important than researchers have recognised, that Gao was West Africa's first city-state, and that it provided the model for the Ghana Empire. The chapter focuses on archaeological evidence (alongside the writing of al-Yaʾqūbī), and uses the settlement of Jenne-Jeno as a case-study from the geographical heartland of the Middle Niger for tracing trade networks and political links between the Sahel, the Savannah, and the Middle East.
Chapter 3, "The Kingdoms of Ghana: Reform Along the Senegal River", positions Ghana not as an empire but as one strong kingdom with tributary kingdoms. It brings written sources to the fore, and argues that this dominion was probably integrated into the societies and economies of the Mediterranean basin already in the early Middle Ages. Gomez argues that the emergence of the Almoravid dynasty, their eleventh-century conquest of northern part of Africa's Atlantic coast, and the rise of the state of Takrur are indicative of a wave of Sunni, fundamentalist Islam in the Middle Niger. A traditional dominance of gold as a medium of trade persisted in the west of the empire, but the east saw the emergence of a major trade in slaves by a now Muslim Sahelian elite, partly via Kanem and the Fezzan.
Chapter 4, "Slavery and Race Imagined in Bilād as-Sūdān", "situates West Africa within the wider context of racial thought, both within the region and externally, and of regional slavery". The term Bilād al-Sūdān, literally "land of the Blacks", that is sub-Saharan Black people, was being used in Arabic, and associated with the export of slaves to the Arab world, from the earliest Arabic sources, dating from no later than the ninth century CE. However, early evidence associates this human trafficking with the Kanem–Bornu Empire focused on Lake Chad rather than the Gao or Ghana empires. Gomez positions the eleventh century as a turning point in the identity of what in Arabic was called Bilād al-Sūdān (literally "land of the Blacks"), and in Arabic conceptions of race and its relationship with slavery. Gomez defines race for his purposes as "the culturally orchestrated, socially sanctioned disaggregation and reformulation of the human species into broad, hierarchical categories reflecting purported respective levels of capacity, propensity, and beauty, and in ways often tethered to phenotypic expression". Gomez contends that the rise of trans-Saharan trade was accompanied by a concomitant process associating the Sūdān ever more closely with slaves, arguing that the notion of Bilād al-Sūdān was a "racialization of space".
Hub AI
African Dominion AI simulator
(@African Dominion_simulator)
African Dominion
African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa, by Michael A. Gomez, focuses on the regions surrounding the Middle Niger Valley. It can be thought of as tracing the rise and fall of empire as a form of local political organization in West Africa, culminating in the Songhay Empire; thus it primarily covers the millennium from the mid-sixth century to 1591 CE, when Songhay came under Moroccan rule. It has been particularly noted for using a wide range of non-European sources, particularly Arabic-language material, to develop a non-Eurocentric account of medieval West African history.
The book was the subject of the first "review round table" to be published by The American Historical Review, in which four different reviews of the book were published in the same volume, along with a response from the author. Another round table discussing the book was held during the November 2019 African Studies Association conference, where discussants were Bruce Hall, Chouki El Hamel, Ousmane Kane and Jan Jansen; the Association awarded the book the ASA Best Book Prize in the same year. The book also won the 2019 American Historical Association Martin A. Klein Prize in African History.
The book comprises fourteen chapters, plus a prologue and epilogue.
Chapter 1, "The Middle Niger in Pre-antiquity and Global Context", argues that the academic discipline of World History has overlooked Africa; the chapter instead presents the Middle Niger region as one whose history is an important component of the medieval World System through its interactions with North Africa and the Middle East.
Concisely surveying prehistory back to around 7000 BCE, the chapter presents the region "as an archetypical riverain geopolitical core for the complex panoply of events to follow", and takes its story to the emergence of the Ghana Empire around 300 CE.
Chapter 2, "Early Gao", challenges an existing grand narrative that has presented a succession of three empires: Ghana, Mali and Songhay. While agreeing with much past research on Gao, Gomez argues that the Gao Empire was more important than researchers have recognised, that Gao was West Africa's first city-state, and that it provided the model for the Ghana Empire. The chapter focuses on archaeological evidence (alongside the writing of al-Yaʾqūbī), and uses the settlement of Jenne-Jeno as a case-study from the geographical heartland of the Middle Niger for tracing trade networks and political links between the Sahel, the Savannah, and the Middle East.
Chapter 3, "The Kingdoms of Ghana: Reform Along the Senegal River", positions Ghana not as an empire but as one strong kingdom with tributary kingdoms. It brings written sources to the fore, and argues that this dominion was probably integrated into the societies and economies of the Mediterranean basin already in the early Middle Ages. Gomez argues that the emergence of the Almoravid dynasty, their eleventh-century conquest of northern part of Africa's Atlantic coast, and the rise of the state of Takrur are indicative of a wave of Sunni, fundamentalist Islam in the Middle Niger. A traditional dominance of gold as a medium of trade persisted in the west of the empire, but the east saw the emergence of a major trade in slaves by a now Muslim Sahelian elite, partly via Kanem and the Fezzan.
Chapter 4, "Slavery and Race Imagined in Bilād as-Sūdān", "situates West Africa within the wider context of racial thought, both within the region and externally, and of regional slavery". The term Bilād al-Sūdān, literally "land of the Blacks", that is sub-Saharan Black people, was being used in Arabic, and associated with the export of slaves to the Arab world, from the earliest Arabic sources, dating from no later than the ninth century CE. However, early evidence associates this human trafficking with the Kanem–Bornu Empire focused on Lake Chad rather than the Gao or Ghana empires. Gomez positions the eleventh century as a turning point in the identity of what in Arabic was called Bilād al-Sūdān (literally "land of the Blacks"), and in Arabic conceptions of race and its relationship with slavery. Gomez defines race for his purposes as "the culturally orchestrated, socially sanctioned disaggregation and reformulation of the human species into broad, hierarchical categories reflecting purported respective levels of capacity, propensity, and beauty, and in ways often tethered to phenotypic expression". Gomez contends that the rise of trans-Saharan trade was accompanied by a concomitant process associating the Sūdān ever more closely with slaves, arguing that the notion of Bilād al-Sūdān was a "racialization of space".