Istwa Nou

Susan and Roderick McIntosh, excavating in the inland delta of the Niger, found exchange running in every direction among the specialist communities of the delta, and between them and the farming populations of the Sahel and savanna around it, and running that way well before 2000 BCE. Sorghum had come west from the eastern Sudan belt by then and joined pearl millet, fonio and livestock in the fields and herds of those communities. The delta held several economies at once, each suited to a different piece of ground and each producing a surplus the others wanted, which made the exchange structural rather than occasional. Towns grew out of that arrangement from below. No commanding centre organised it and no state was required to make it work. Every model of urbanisation that treats a centralising state as the precondition has to account for a place where commerce arrived first and kings arrived afterward.

The second great region of the early West African commercial revolution lay in and around the inland delta of the Niger, where the river spreads into channels across a wide basin. The delta packs several different environments into a small compass, and the communities living there specialised accordingly. Along the bayous were people who lived by fishing. On the dry ground between the channels were growers of African rice. For hundreds of kilometres around the delta, farmers raised pearl millet, fonio and other grains without irrigation. None of these communities could produce everything it needed where it stood, and each could produce a surplus of one thing that its neighbours wanted. Fish for grain, rice for millet, one specialised product for another. Out of that arrangement came routes, standing relationships, middlemen and markets. No state organised any of it. The trade arose from the ground conditions, and it was running centuries before any political authority in the region was in a position to tax it.