Trans-Saharan Africa in World History

We have recently revisited Austen's accessible read, Trans-Saharan Africa in World History, and highly recommend it. Sure, one could find dense, academic articles that see the Sahara as a model for studying African history or intra-African relations, but this is the best book-length work related to the subject that integrates the Maghreb and the Sudanic regions of West Africa into a single narrative. Austen highlights some of the Sahara's economic, religious, cultural, political, and ethnic diversity and contributions to African history and global history in a way that shows how, for several centuries, the Sahara was a global highway that connected various regions of Africa together, as well as becoming an important node in Afro-Eurasian commerce and exchange. Indeed, one learns much about how new trends in ideology and material culture went both ways in the northern half of the African continent, as well as placing it in a broader hemispheric and Islamic perspective so one can clearly see how trans-Saharan Africa was, in some ways, economically co-dependent, even if Austen argues that the Maghreb was less dependent on trade with the Sudan.

And the importance of Islam in regulating and fueling trade, even though trade between the Sahara and the Sudan predates Islam by at least several centuries, going back to the introduction of the camel, surely contributed to both 'shores' of the Sahara as various African societies (and Arabs) influenced each other and shaped the political destinies of states to the far north and the far south. One sees this in the Almoravids and Almohads, which were Berber dynasties with clear links to the world of Islam and trans-Saharan Africa, as well as in relations between Morocco and Songhay, the spread of Sufism and Islamic learning, and even the rise of manufactures and textiles from the Sudan into the Sahara and Maghrib, illustrating how interlinked these economies were. 

Sure, the Maghreb states were more thoroughly Islamized and tied to the 'Arab world' and Mediterranean, but Africans (especially Berbers in the north and the Sahara) profoundly shaped the development of new trends in trade, traversing the desert, the spread of new technology and ideas, the rise and fall of states, and the economic integration of the entire northern half of Africa into the global economy in the era before European hegemony. Indeed, this is something that merits further inquiry, how trans-Saharan commerce, movement and learning contributed to the medieval world, as well as shaping the growth of cities and intellectual thought in Africa.