Istwa Nou

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.

Between the seventh and the fourteenth centuries the Muslim ruled lands sat across the middle of the landmass joining Africa, Asia and Europe, and the routes through them carried more than goods. Silk, gold and gunpowder moved along those connections. So did the writings of Aristotle, which reached Latin Europe through Arabic. So did religions, and so did plague. Africa sat inside this system. It supplied the gold behind Mediterranean currency and held the southern end of the Indian Ocean routes. When European ships worked out how to sail round Africa in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they took over a network that was already running, by finding a sea route past the African and Asian merchants who had held the middle of it for centuries. From 1492 the Americas and the Pacific were added, which made the network global for the first time and slid the centre of gravity of world commerce from the Middle East to the Atlantic coast of Europe. The compass, the caravel and the cannon were themselves borrowed.