Istwa Nou

In the second millennium BCE a new kind of town appeared in the belt of savanna south of the Sahara. Its reason for existing was manufacture and transport. Craftsmen made goods for sale at distance, and the settlement sat where routes met. With the towns came a class of people who had not existed before, merchants who bought, sold and put up the capital to move cargo. In West Africa the skilled producers organised as well, banding together to hold their position in the new arrangement. The order of events matters. In the western and central Sudan belt, and later and separately in the Congo basin, this economy took shape before states did. It grew straight out of villages and medium range trade, with no era of kings and priesthoods in between. Towns and long distance commerce were established in West Africa early in the second millennium BCE. Chiefdoms and kingdoms came several centuries later, which left the new commerce in more hands than the Levantine version ever reached.

East of the Mediterranean, in lands that had held states and steep social hierarchies for centuries, the new commerce changed who moved goods. Merchants took over from the agents of kings and priesthoods as the principal carriers of long-distance trade. Skilled artisans found buyers beyond the palace and the temple and worked for a wider market. Kings adjusted. They gave up monopolising the acquisition of valuable goods and took taxes on the traffic and tolls on the roads instead, raising the value of what they taxed by protecting the merchants and the routes. Protection sold for revenue is the origin of a great deal of later state finance. By the middle of the first millennium BCE the Garamantes of the central Sahara had joined West African trade to the Mediterranean system. Gold and other goods from the Sudan belt reached Carthage and later Rome through them, on routes the camel and Islam would inherit centuries afterwards.