Page 109 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol V

1886 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

its Atlantic counterpart, but as far as we can tell, it in- Further Reading
creased despite the competition. This complementarity Abun-Nasr, J. M. (1975). A history of the Maghrib (2nd ed). Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.
may be explained by the general growth of African pop-
Ajayi, J. F.A., & Crowder, M. (Eds.). (1972–1976). History of West Africa.
ulations due to the nutritional impact of New Word crops New York: Columbia University Press.
such as maize, cassava, and peanuts. Also, in contrast to Austen, R. (1987). African economic history: Internal development and
external dependency. London: James Currey.
the New World slave trade, which generally imported two Austen, R. (2005). The trans-Saharan world: Africa’s great desert as a
males for every female slave, Islamic markets for slave highway of commerce and civilization in the era of Islam, 650–1900.
New York: Oxford University Press.
labor somewhat favored women over men. European
Bovill, E. W. (1968). The golden trade of the Moors (2nd ed). London:
efforts to end the trans-Saharan slave trade provide us Oxford University Press.
with some of our best information on its extent, but they Brett, M., & Fentress, E. (1996). The Berbers. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
De Villiers, M., & Hirtle, S. (2002). Sahara:A natural history. New York:
did not become effective until shortly before 1900. Walker & Company.
Hunwick, J. O., & Powell, E. T. (2002). The African diaspora in the
Trans-Saharan Trade: Mediterranean lands of Islam. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener
Publishers.
Innovation and Termination Levtzion, N., & Hopkins, J. F. P. (2000). Corpus of early Arabic sources
During its last important era (c. 1700–1900), the trans- for West African history. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers.
Savage, E. (1997). A gateway to hell, a gateway to paradise: The North
Saharan trade came to include large quantities of items African response to the Arab conquest. Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press.
that had previously formed only a very small percentage of Savage, E. (Ed.). (1992). The human commodity: Perspectives on the trans-
Saharan slave trade. London: Cass.
caravan cargoes, such as the hides and skins of goats and
cattle, ivory, and, for a brief but very flourishing period in
the latter 1800s,ostrich feathers.During this time cities in
the western and central Sudan developed their own hand-
icraft industries, which provided Saharan populations Transportation—
with their characteristic blue cotton garments and also pro-
duced tanned “Moroccan” leather for export overseas. Overview
This final flowering of trans-Saharan commerce
depended upon increased world demand for various cross the millennia of recorded history, changing
consumer goods and the intermediate commodities used Amodes of transportation allowed wanderers, traders
in producing them (such as gum arabic, obtained from and missionaries to carry themselves and innumerable
several species of acacia trees native to the Sudanic different ideas and things across the face of the earth,
region and used in finishing cloth). The driving force of moving ever further, faster and more frequently. As
this expanding market was the industrializing economy transport expanded in range and carrying capacity, it
of Europe and North America. Once Europeans, for rea- accelerated historical change by bringing new ideas, new
sons having little or nothing to do with trans-Saharan skills, and new goods to new places, and tightening the
trade, took formal colonial possession of western and human web of communication that existed from the
west central African territories, new industrial technolo- time language emerged and bands of fully human
gies broke through the forest barrier that had protected beings began to spread from the African savannas where
desert routes. Railways and later roads now provided the they first arose.
Sudan with direct access to the Atlantic. Despite occa-
sional French fantasies, no rail or road arteries were ever Origins
built across the Sahara, where camel caravans still carry To begin with, human muscles were the only means of
salt from desert quarries to the lands of the south. transport our ancestors knew. By walking erect and rely-
ing solely on leg muscles for locomotion, they freed
Ralph A. Austen
hands and arms for carrying babies and all sorts of