Waubonsee Community College

African dominion, a new history of empire in early and medieval West Africa, Michael A. Gomez

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

maps

index present

non fiction

African dominion

bibliography

983824904

Michael A. Gomez

a new history of empire in early and medieval West Africa

A groundbreaking history that puts early and medieval West Africa in a global context Pick up almost any book on early and medieval world history and empire, and where do you find West Africa? On the periphery. This pioneering book, the first on this period of the region's history in a generation, tells a different story. Interweaving political and social history and drawing on a rich array of sources, including Arabic manuscripts, oral histories, and recent archaeological findings, Michael Gomez unveils a new vision of how categories of ethnicity, race, gender, and caste emerged in Africa and in global history more generally. Scholars have long held that such distinctions arose during the colonial period, but Gomez shows they developed much earlier. Focusing on the Savannah and Sahel region, Gomez traces the exchange of ideas and influences with North Africa and the Central Islamic Lands by way of merchants, scholars, and pilgrims. Islam's growth in West Africa, in tandem with intensifying commerce that included slaves, resulted in a series of political experiments unique to the region, culminating in the rise of empire. A major preoccupation was the question of who could be legally enslaved, which together with other factors led to the construction of new ideas about ethnicity, race, gender, and caste--long before colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. Telling a radically new story about early Africa in global history, African Dominion is set to be the standard work on the subject for many years to come

Prologue -- Part I. Early Sahel and savannah. 1. The Middle Niger in pre-antiquity and global context ; 2. Early Gao ; 3. The kingdoms of Ghana : reform along the Senegal River ; 4. Slavery and race imagined in Bilād as-Sūdān -- Part II. Imperial Mali. 5. The meanings of Sunjata and the dawn of imperial Mali ; 6. Mansā Mūsā and global Mali ; 7. Intrigue, Islam, and Ibn Baṭṭūṭa -- Part III. Imperial Songhay. 8. Sunni ʻAlī and the reinvention of Songhay ; 9. The Sunni and the scholars : a tale of revenge ; 10. Renaissance : the age of Askia al-Ḥājj Muḥammad ; 11. Of clerics and concubines -- Part IV. Le dernier de l'empire. 12. Of fitnas and fratricide : the nadir of imperial Songhay ; 13. Surfeit and stability : the era of Askia Dāwūd ; 14. The rending asunder : dominion's end -- Epilogue. A thousand years