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World History 2

<OpenstaxParagraph>
	Camel caravans from North Africa began trekking across the Sahara Desert in antiquity (the period Before the Common Era, or BCE). The trade reached a peak during the ninth to the fifteenth centuries of the Common Era (CE), when lines of thousands of camels traveled a web-like network of trade routes that spanned the whole of North and West Africa. They moved a variety of goods, including copper, salt, ivory, enslaved people, textiles, and gold, northward from sub-Saharan West Africa to the Mediterranean coast, eastward to the Horn of Africa and Egypt, and southward into the Sahel, the semiarid region between the Sahara Desert and the Sudanian savanna to the south (<a href="#fig-00001">Figure 3.4</a>).
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxFigure id="fig-00001" src="https://openstax.org/apps/archive/20240226.174525/resources/be20af8af546a5c9438428097f40090272efab75" alt="A map of North Africa is shown. There are dotted lines connecting cities across the entire region north to south and east to west. The following cities are labeled: Marrakech, Sijilmasa, Awdaghost, Timbuktu, Djenne, Gao, Agadez, Bilma, Zawila, Khufra, Cairo, Suakin, and Zeila. One dotted line crosses the Red Sea from Suakin in Africa to Arabia. The Mali Empire in western Africa, the Ghana Empire in northwestern Africa, Kanem-Bornu in central north Africa, and Egypt in northeastern Africa are labeled." mediaType="image/jpg" width="1101" height="601" />
<OpenstaxFigureText width="1101">
	Figure 3.4 The trans-Saharan trade routes of the ninth to fifteenth centuries (red dotted lines) stretched like a web across the vast expanse of North Africa. (attribution: Copyright Rice University, OpenStax, under CC BY 4.0 license)
</OpenstaxFigureText>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	Long before the <OpenstaxTerm>trans-Saharan trade route</OpenstaxTerm>’s golden age, commerce in the Sahara was relatively localized and consisted of the exchange of agricultural products like rice, sorghum, and millet for the products of new technologies such as iron goods or rare commodities such as salt. These early inter- and intraregional exchanges were made possible by pack animals like mules, horses, and donkeys, but trade was limited because these animals were biologically ill-suited for the extremes of the Saharan environment. When the Romans conquered North Africa in the second century BCE, they introduced the camel, which was already a beast of burden in Egypt. Capable of lasting days without water and having feet and eyelashes adapted for travel in sandy environments, camels enabled the people of North Africa to carry on regular long-distance trade across the Sahara for the first time beginning in the eighth century CE. The camel saddle, invented by the Tuareg people of North Africa, enabled camels to be ridden, which furthered their usefulness to trans-Saharan trade. The introduction of the date palm also helped make systematic long-distance trade possible. The fruit of the date palm is high in sugar, a natural preservative, and when dried it provided a high-calorie, easily transportable food supply to fortify traders on long journeys.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	Trans-Saharan trade was also critically dependent on highly paid nomadic North African Berber (Amazigh)<a id="foot-00001-ref" href="#foot-00001"><OpenstaxU>1</OpenstaxU></a> intermediaries and the string of <OpenstaxTerm>oasis towns</OpenstaxTerm> that connected distant parts of the network in an otherwise unforgiving landscape (<a href="#fig-00002">Figure 3.5</a>). Oasis towns provided traveling merchants with places to rest, water their animals, and acquire provisions for the next leg of their journey. They served the same function as the caravanserais, inns for travelers that existed throughout the Islamic world, including along the Silk Roads in Asia, in the Middle East, and in Egypt and Morocco. The Imazighen’s skills as caravan leaders and go-betweens facilitated the movement of everything from gold ingots to ostrich feathers across thousands of square miles of desert. Yet Amazigh traders were responsible for much more than the movement of goods and commodities. They were also devout believers in Islam who spread Islamic culture, law, custom, and tradition and helped to fuse a network of local and regional trade routes into a truly continent-spanning enterprise.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxFigure id="fig-00002" src="https://openstax.org/apps/archive/20240226.174525/resources/ec7e0e83a7721d5e99231039ce002e86215f2a19" alt="This photograph shows a cluster of green trees in front of a city with brown buildings and sparse trees. Sand hills are located in the background and a blue sky. In the foreground there is rough, dry, sand-colored land." mediaType="image/jpg" width="1100" height="734" />
<OpenstaxFigureText width="1100">
	Figure 3.5 This photo shows the Saharan oasis city of Taghit, ringed by sand hills in modern-day Algeria. (credit: “Mountains of sand loom over the oasis village of Taghit in the Sahara” by The Central Intelligence Agency: The World Factbook/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)
</OpenstaxFigureText>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	A principal commodity exchanged during this early stage of trade was <OpenstaxTerm>salt</OpenstaxTerm>, which acted as a sort of currency. Not only is salt necessary to human and animal life, but it also helps to preserve foods, an important concern of people in an age before refrigeration technology existed. Communities on the edges of the desert acted as intermediaries in this trade, trading salt to forest tribes to the south that had access to goldfields. Only over time were other highly valuable trading goods introduced, such as gold and copper, which were then passed across the desert from tropical West Africa to the far reaches of the North African coast and beyond.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	Trade across the Sahara gradually intensified between the fifth and seventh centuries CE, and in the eighth and ninth centuries, a series of main links became established. These developments were made possible primarily as the result of two important changes. First, the <OpenstaxTerm>Ghana Empire</OpenstaxTerm> of West Africa emerged as the earliest large-scale political entity in the region, and second, the Islamic conquest of North Africa led to the rise of Muslim states and a general cultural unification of the region. Combined, these developments brought people with shared interests and similar characteristics together in conditions that enabled them to consolidate and expand their economic interests, particularly as demand increased for gold from the Sudan.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	As trade grew, Arab merchants in Morocco and in Islamic states in North Africa began to buy sub-Saharan gold. By the eleventh century, the <OpenstaxTerm>gold trade</OpenstaxTerm> was so successful that it was influencing commerce and society in the Mediterranean (<a href="#fig-00003">Figure 3.6</a>). For the first time, West African gold was used to mint European coins. This growth in the market for gold spurred the expansion of new links in the trans-Saharan trade route and resulted in the opening of a major trade artery between the towns of Sijilmasa, north of the Sahara, and Awdaghost to the south.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxFigure id="fig-00003" src="https://openstax.org/apps/archive/20240226.174525/resources/e764945ce83739aeaddf96acc910d5dffd81402f" alt="A map of northwest Africa is shown. In the western portion of the map, there are gold-colored sections by the regions of Bambuk, Boure, and Lobi and south of Lobi indicated. These are identified in the key as ‘Gold Fields.’ Starting at the north of the continent and heading south, the cities of Tunis, Kairouan, Tahert, Tlemcen, Fes, Marrakech, Nul, Tamdoult, Sijilmasa, Ouargla, Ghadames, Tamentit, Ghat, Takedda, Gao, Tadmekka, Timbuktu, Araouane, Taghaza, Araouane, Idjil, Ouadane, Aoudaghost, Oualata, Koumbi, and Saleh are labeled and connected with dotted lines. The City of Djenne is labeled as well as the region of Tuat. Aoudaghost and Sijilmasa are circled." mediaType="image/jpg" width="901" height="1051" />
<OpenstaxFigureText width="901">
	Figure 3.6 The network of medieval trade routes in West Africa (red dotted lines) as mapped in the 1960s by French historian Raymond Mauny. Although they were not connected directly, Sijilmasa in present-day Morocco and Awdaghost in Mauritania were indirectly linked by routes that united other trading cities in the surrounding region. (attribution: Copyright Rice University, OpenStax, under CC BY 4.0 license)
</OpenstaxFigureText>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	One of the greatest early <OpenstaxTerm>Sudanic</OpenstaxTerm> empires, the powerful states that emerged in the region of West Africa south of the Sahara Desert, was Mali. <OpenstaxTerm>Mali</OpenstaxTerm> brought together the key components that had contributed to the earlier expansion of trans-Saharan trade. On the one hand, its rulers were Muslim, and the fact that they shared the same religion with many trans-Saharan traders strengthened the ties between these groups. On the other hand, these rulers exerted direct control over the goldfields at Bure. The vitally important trade centers of Timbuktu and Gao were part of the empire, as were the trading centers of Awdaghost, Oualata (Walata), and Tadmekka. Although both gold and salt remained the principal commodities of exchange, other commodities such as textiles, enslaved people, ivory, precious stones, and shea butter (a vegetable fat from the shea tree nut) were also regular exports.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	During the ninth to fifteenth centuries, <OpenstaxTerm>caravans</OpenstaxTerm> routinely plied the sands of the Sahara, moving goods from distant West Africa to Egypt and centers of trade in North Africa, and from there onward, either across the Mediterranean to southern Europe or overland by way of the Sinai Peninsula to the region of the Levant in the Near East (modern Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel). From there, West African commodities could arrive at one of the land-based western terminals of the Silk Roads in such trade centers as the coastal city of Tyre in Lebanon, and farther inland, at Aleppo in Syria. Africa at this time was a key player in the vast commercial enterprise that laid the foundation for the first global economies.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxAside id="foot-00001">
	<a href="#foot-00001-ref"><OpenstaxU>1</OpenstaxU></a> There is a growing awareness about the use of the term <OpenstaxEm>Berber</OpenstaxEm> to describe indigenous North Africans, many of whom self-identify as Amazigh, or Imazighen (plural). With this understanding, although we have introduced the term <OpenstaxEm>Berber</OpenstaxEm> as the most commonly used name in English, we have generally preferred to use the term <OpenstaxEm>Amazigh</OpenstaxEm> in this text.
</OpenstaxAside>

3.1.1 Saharan Trade Routes

1 Understanding the Past

1.1 Developing a Global Perspective

1.1.1 World History as Preparation for Life After College

1.1.2 World History and Global Citizenship

1.1.3 Features of This Textbook

1.2 Primary Sources

1.2.1 Learning to Evaluate Documents and Images

1.2.2 Documentary Sources: Competing Narratives

1.2.3 Textual Sources: The Importance of Language

1.2.4 Hidden in History

1.3 Causation and Interpretation in History

1.3.1 Levels of Causation

1.3.2 Interpretation in History

2 Exchange in East Asia and the Indian Ocean

2.1 India and International Connections

2.1.1 The Mughal Empire

2.1.2 The Sultanate of Gujarat

2.1.3 The Rise of the Maratha Empire

2.1.4 European Colonialism

2.2 The Malacca Sultanate

2.2.1 The Rise of the Malacca Sultanate

2.2.2 European Malacca

2.3 Exchange in East Asia

2.3.1 Japan

2.3.2 China’s Dynastic Exchanges

2.3.3 Korea and Its Neighbors

3 Early Modern Africa and the Wider World

3.1 The Roots of African Trade

3.1.2 The Spread of Islam

3.1.3 The Mali Empire

3.2 The Songhai Empire

3.2.1 The Rise of Imperial Songhai

3.2.2 The Reign of Askia the Great

3.2.3 The Decline of Songhai

3.3 The Swahili Coast

3.3.1 The Rise of the Swahili City-States

3.3.2 Slavery on the Swahili Coast

3.3.3 The Contest for the Swahili Coast

3.4 The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade

3.4.1 The Role of Kanem-Bornu

3.4.2 The Arrival of Europeans

3.4.3 The Later Trans-Saharan Slave Trade

4 The Islamic World

4.1 A Connected Islamic World

4.1.1 Politics and Religion in the Ummah

4.1.2 Islamic Trade Networks

4.1.3 Technology in the Islamic World

4.2 The Ottoman Empire

4.2.1 Culture and Society

4.2.2 Expansion, Revolutions, and Reform

4.2.3 Science and Technology

4.3 The Safavid Empire

4.3.1 The Rise of the Safavid Empire

4.3.2 Establishing Shi‘ism as the State Religion

4.3.3 Safavid Government and Culture

5 Foundations of the Atlantic World

5.1 The Protestant Reformation

5.1.1 The Origins of the Protestant Reformation

5.1.2 Calvinists, Anabaptists, and Anglicans

5.1.3 The Catholic Reformation and the Wars of Religion

5.2 Crossing the Atlantic

5.2.1 The Rise of Maritime Nations

5.2.2 The Columbian Exchange

5.3 The Mercantilist Economy

5.3.1 The Rise of Mercantilism

5.3.2 Mercantilism and the Expansion of Empire

5.3.3 Mercantilism and Its Critics

5.4 The Atlantic Slave Trade

5.4.1 Slavery and the Triangular Trade

5.4.2 African and North American Slavery

5.4.3 The Economics of Slavery

6 Colonization and Economic Expansion

6.1 European Colonization in the Americas

6.1.1 Spain’s Encomienda System

6.1.2 English Settlements in North America

6.1.3 French and Dutch Settlements

6.2 The Rise of a Global Economy

6.2.1 The Seven Years’ War

6.2.2 British Influence in India

6.2.3 China’s Dominance in Trade

6.2.4 Colonial Resistance and Revolution

6.3 Capitalism and the First Industrial Revolution

6.3.1 From Mercantilism to Capitalism

6.3.2 Mechanization

6.3.3 Marxism

7 Revolutions in Europe and North America

7.1 The Enlightenment

7.1.1 The Authority of Reason

7.1.2 Natural Rights

7.1.3 Social Contract Theory

7.2 The Exchange of Ideas in the Public Sphere

7.2.1 Public Debate and Dissent

7.2.2 The Republic of Letters

7.2.3 Academies, Universities, and Intellectuals

7.3 Revolutions: America, France, and Haiti

7.3.1 The American Revolution

7.3.2 The French Revolution

7.3.3 The Haitian Revolution

7.4 Nationalism, Liberalism, Conservatism, and the Political Order