Istwa Nou

Women prospered as independent traders in large parts of Africa for a structural reason. Marriage there did not, as far back as the evidence reaches, convert a wife into an economic dependent of her husband. She kept her own property, her own trade and her own earnings. Once that is established, a run of questions opens up which historians have mostly declined to ask. Where women have held authority, what were the customs and institutions through which they held it? Where major changes in material culture occurred, which of them did women drive? Ehret's earlier chapters give examples, crediting women with the invention of ceramics and with the creation of agricultural ways of life. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because of what crossed the Atlantic. The women who ran the markets of Saint-Domingue, and the madan sara who still move most of the food in Haiti, work inside an arrangement their great grandmothers would have recognised, one that was in place long before any ship.

In the second and first millennia BCE a new social class appears in several parts of the world: merchants, people who live by moving other people's goods over long distances. Africans well south in the continent were among the first to build such networks. The towns of Tichit, in what is now Mauritania, were doing this kind of business in the second millennium BCE. A comparable development was under way separately in the eastern Mediterranean and the Levant by the beginning of the first millennium BCE. One driver on both sides was demand for metal, iron above all, as smelting spread and buyers appeared for what the smiths made. The usual telling gives this story to Phoenicia. Ehret puts Africa in it from the start on the evidence of dates. Tichit was a node of long-distance trade a full thousand years before the Phoenician cities built their Mediterranean network, and its towns, manufactures and merchants were African.