2000 BCE to 300 CE · Africanspan
In West Africa commerce came first and the empires came after
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In the Middle East and Egypt, states and steeply unequal societies were long established before trade shifted onto a merchant basis during the first millennium BCE. The western and central Sudan ran the sequence the other way. From the second millennium BCE onward the people there were building towns and forming new classes of merchants and artisans, driven by specialised manufacturing and by the exchange of manufactured goods for the manufactures and raw materials of distant places. Powerful states arrived afterward. Wagadu and the empires like it rose in the early first millennium CE, and what they did was control and protect commercial relations that already existed. That is a different route to complexity from the one the textbooks describe. Commerce generated towns, towns generated artisans, artisans generated wealth, and wealth eventually attracted rulers who wanted a share of it. Any theory that lays out one path from small-scale society to urbanism and the state has a West African problem.
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