During the heyday of camel caravan traffic--from the eighth century
CE arrival of Islam in North Africa to the early twentieth-century
building of European colonial railroads that linked the Sudan with
the Atlantic--the Sahara was one of the world's great commercial
highways, bringing gold, slaves, and other commodities northward
and sending both manufactured goods and Mediterranean culture
southward into the Sudan. Historian Ralph A. Austen here tells the
remarkable story of an African world that grew out of more than one
thousand years of trans-Saharan trading. Perhaps the most enduring
impact of this trade and the common cultural reference point of
trans-Saharan Africa was Islam. Austen traces this faith in its
various forms--as a legal system for regulating trade, an
inspiration for reformist movements, and a vehicle of literacy and
cosmopolitan knowledge. He also analyzes the impact of European
overseas expansion, which marginalized trans-Saharan commerce in
global terms but stimulated its local growth. Indeed, trans-Saharan
culture not only adapted to colonial changes, but often thrived
upon them, remaining a potent force into the twenty-first century.
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