Istwa Nou

Levantine trade crossed the Red Sea into the Horn of Africa, and during the later half of the first millennium BCE it ran around the Indian Ocean shores to India. Indian merchants carried the network further, to southeast Asia and the islands of south Asia. Late in the same millennium overland routes linked it across central Asia to east Asia. Sea trade also began reaching far down the eastern African coast, while at the far end of the system other sea links ran up the Atlantic face of Europe to Cornish tin and Baltic amber. What that describes is a web with many centres and many arteries, and Africa is inside it at several points. The Horn is the hinge between the Red Sea corridor and the Indian Ocean world. The eastern African coast supplied the system, and the goods that made it worth running, ivory, gold, tortoiseshell and frankincense, were African in origin and African in production.

By the first three centuries CE, traders on the trans-Saharan routes were carrying a new commodity north: gold from the mines and river deposits of West Africa. It changed the standing of Africa in world economic history. In later centuries the same metal backed the dinar of the Islamic world and the florin of Renaissance Italy, which means monetary systems in places whose people never saw a West African miner rested on West African labour. The other consequence was currency itself. As trade grew in scale and complexity, regions began producing their first coinages, tokens carrying value separately from any particular commodity being exchanged. Money is a repeated answer to a shared problem, and Africa's commercial networks arrived at it as independently as anyone else did. Gold moving north across the desert is also the start of a pattern that runs through this whole timeline, in which African production ends up denominated in somebody else's accounts.