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23 - Africa: states, empires, and connections

from Part II - Trans-regional and regional perspectives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2015

By
Stanley Burstein
Edited by
Craig Benjamin
Craig Benjamin
Affiliation:
Grand Valley State University, Michigan
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Summary

Ancient Africa occupies a peculiar place in the scholarship on world history. Raymond Mauny, the great French historian of Medieval Africa, entitled his history of ancient Africa Les siecles obscurs de l'Afrique, Africa, dark, of course, not because nothing important happened but because of the lack of written sources. The twelfth century BCE was marked by a true 'crisis of the old order' in western Asia and North Africa. The integration of North Africa into the Roman Empire coincided with a massive increase in demand for the products of the region to meet the needs of Rome with its huge population, perhaps a million strong, and the western Mediterranean provinces. The isolation of Sub-Saharan Africa from Eurasia that had begun in the third millennium BCE was gradually overcome. By the fourth century CE, the framework for the full reintegration of Sub-Saharan Africa into Eurasia as a whole was in place.

Keywords

Roman statedisbursed tax revenuesEuropelate antiquitywestern MediterraneanUmayyad dynasty
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge World History , pp. 631 - 661
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2015

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References

Further Reading

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