2000 to 1000 BCE · Africanspan
Trade stops being an arm of the palace and becomes a trade
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The phrase commercial revolution names one specific change. Before it, long distance trade was run by agents of kings and agents of temples, moving goods on behalf of an institution that owned them. After it, an independent class of merchants supplied and carried the goods, on their own account and at their own risk. Economic historians have long recognised this shift in the ancient Mediterranean and the Levant as a turning point, the moment trade stopped being an extension of state power and started generating wealth, rank and political weight of its own. The same structural change occurred in the West African savanna during the same broad period, and it happened there independently. West Africa produced merchants, networks and towns organised around exchange rather than royal decree. If a merchant revolution can occur twice, in two places out of contact with one another, then it is a recurrent thing that human societies do. Africa was doing it on schedule.
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