1000 BCE to 1500 CE · Africanspan
The trade routes Muslim merchants expanded were already ancient
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The joining up of the separate commercial revolutions during the first millennium BCE, and the extension of trade contacts across the lands and seas of Africa and Eurasia, is the development that eventually made one connected history out of many. Historians usually award the credit to the later age of commercial expansion beginning in the seventh century CE with the rise of Islam and a trading zone running from Spain to India. That age was secondary in the strict sense. It revived and built outward from long distance links already in place well before the first millennium BCE ended. The routes Muslim merchants worked in the eighth and ninth centuries had been opened by Garamantean traders across the Sahara, by Aksumite merchants on the Red Sea, by Levantine shippers and by Indian Ocean sailors, some of them centuries and some of them a full millennium earlier. Crediting the seventh century with the founding of global commerce mistakes a renovation for a construction.
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