The world was already linked three thousand years before Columbus sailed

The commercial revolutions of the second and first millennia BCE set a process running that has never stopped. Piece by piece, and mostly through intermediaries who never saw both ends of a route, they joined more and more of Africa and Eurasia into one system of exchange. By the first millennium BCE the roads carried more than freight. Ideas moved along them, and religions, and craft techniques, and people, and the diseases people bring. The usual account of globalisation starts in the fifteenth century with Portuguese and Spanish ships. What those ships found were routes that had been working for two thousand years under African and Asian management, with West African gold reaching the Mediterranean, East African ports on the Indian Ocean circuit, and Southeast Asian crops growing in Madagascar. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because the Atlantic system that carried Africans to Saint-Domingue is normally described as the moment Europe connected the world. It was Europe joining a network already three thousand years old.

Horizon I on Martinique produced some of the earliest radiocarbon dates in the West Indies for the Cedrosan Saladoid, the pottery-making farming people who moved north into the islands from the South American mainland. Rouse treats the date as the opening of a long demographic change rather than a single landing. The islands were already occupied by Archaic-age bands, smaller groups who fished, gathered and hunted and who did not farm. Over the following centuries the farmers displaced them. Martinique sits in the middle of the Lesser Antilles, on the road running from the mouth of the Orinoco up the arc towards Puerto Rico and Hispaniola, and anything travelling that road passes it. I put a Martinique radiocarbon date on a Haitian timeline because the people the Spanish met on Hispaniola in 1492 came out of this movement. Their arrival is datable, gradual and about two thousand years long. Haiti has an indigenous beginning that predates every European in the story.

Herodotus wrote down what Carthaginians told Greek listeners about a coast beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. The ships would land, the crews would set their wares out in a row along the shore and raise smoke. People living there came down when they saw it, left gold beside the goods and withdrew. The Carthaginians came ashore and looked. If the gold matched the value they took it and sailed; if it did not they went back aboard and waited while more was added. Neither side touched what the other had put down until the exchange was settled. The same silent barter appears in much later accounts of the gold trade in the West African interior. The metal most likely came from the alluvial fields of Galam and Bambuk on the upper Niger and Senegal. This is among the earliest written notices of West African gold reaching the outside world.

The evidence is indirect and it points to small states in Aïr, in West Africa, by 1000 BCE or earlier. The Nok region of Nigeria appears to have held an early strong state during the first millennium BCE, and its wealth most likely came from trading the metals found in its territory. Nok is famous for something else. Its terracotta heads and figures are among the earliest known figurative sculpture in West Africa and they sit in museums around the world, captioned as art and nothing more. The political economy behind the workshops goes unmentioned. Sculpture of that quality in that quantity implies patrons, and the patrons were living off control of metal and the trade in it. Together with Aïr, the finding puts political complexity in the Sudan belt at 1000 BCE or earlier. That is contemporary with the first Iron Age states around the African Great Lakes, and centuries before the gold trade that made Ghana, Mali and Songhay rich.