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THOUGHTS ON THE WESTERN SAVANNAH AND SAHEL

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2021

Michael A. Gomez
Michael A. Gomez*
Affiliation:
New York University
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Abstract

A recent revival of interest in the empires of the medieval western Savannah and Sahel has generated new insights into slavery, ethnicity, race, and gender in precolonial West Africa. New histories of medieval West Africa also expand the spatial frame through which the relationship between the region's polities and the broader world can be understood. This essay offers a survey of that literature.

Keywords

MaliWest AfricaNorth Africahistoriographyprecolonialslavery
Type
FORUM: The Imperial Tradition in the Sahel
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 61 , Issue 3 , November 2020 , pp. 319 - 326
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

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10 For example, see ‘Review roundtable: Gomez, Michael A., African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa’, American Historical Review, 124:2 (2019), 581–94Google Scholar.

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14 See Gomez, African Dominion, esp. ch. 11.

15 For example, see Delafosse, M., Haut-Sénégal-Niger (Soudan française), 3 Volumes (Paris, 1912)Google Scholar.

16 This is consistent with Burbank and Cooper's definition of empires as ‘large units, expansionist or with a memory of power . . . that maintain distinction and hierarchy as they incorporate new people. . . . The concept of empire presumes that different peoples within the polity will be governed differently’; see Burbank, J. and Cooper, F., Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, 2010), 8Google Scholar.

17 See Fernandes, V., Description de la Côte d'Afrique de Ceuta au Sénégal (Paris, 1938), 84–5Google Scholar.

18 Scott, J., The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, 2009)Google ScholarPubMed.