Gold-Salt Trade

5 Key excerpts on "Gold-Salt Trade"

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  eBook - ePub

  Encyclopedia of World Trade: From Ancient Times to the Present

  From Ancient Times to the Present

  • Cynthia Clark Northrup, Jerry H. Bentley, Alfred E. Eckes, Jr, Patrick Manning, Kenneth Pomeranz, Steven Topik(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The most important development in Saharan trade aside from use of the camel was the gradual introduction of Islam, first to North Africa and then across the Sahara, between the seventh and eleventh centuries. Early Muslim traders established far-flung networks of fellow Muslim agents across the desert and in sub-Saharan Africa in the centuries before larger-scale conversions to Islam. Islam provided a basic shared cultural framework that governed everything from personal behavior to contractual agreements and taxes. This common reference point made trade easier and made Islam attractive to African rulers and other elites. Conversion to Islam provided not only social differentiation but also access to education, favorable trade terms, and access to credit.

  By circa 900 c.e ., the North African city of Sijilmasa imported significant amounts of gold directly from the kingdoms of Ghana and Wangara.

  Saharan Trade, 1000 c.e . With the introduction of camels in the early centuries of the common era, it became possible for large trading caravans to cross the inhospitable wasteland of the Sahara between population centers in West and North Africa. Traders heading north carried gold, ivory, and slaves; commodities moving southward included textiles and metalware. Salt was frequently traded and used as a form of exchange. (Mark Stein Studios)

  The trade route along the way to Ghana passed through regions where salt was plentiful. While Ghana was rich in gold, it lacked salt. As salt was brought to Ghana in exchange for gold, a Gold-Salt Trade was established. This lucrative trade was controlled by the Almoravids in the north and Ghana in the south.

  Most of the Muslim world remained relatively unaware of the gold wealth of sub-Saharan Africa, however, until the Mali emperor Mansa Musa spent so much gold on his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 that worldwide gold prices remained depressed for years after his trip to the Holy Cities (Jerusalem and Medina). The Songhay empire that succeeded the Mali empire drew much of its ultimate power from controlling the sale of gold and slaves across the desert through the major entrepôts of Djenne, Gao, and Timbuktu. Evidence from travelers and commercial records suggests that the trade between Europe, the Maghreb, and sub-Saharan Africa became both large in volume and complex in the sixteenth century. This trade grew to such importance that in 1592 the Sa’adian sultan sent an expeditionary army across the Sa hara to take Timbuktu from the waning Songhay state, securing the increasingly important supplies of gold and slaves. The volume of exported gold has been estimated at one ton of gold per year during the Middle Ages. The inflow of precious metal greatly bolstered the political positions of the Maghreb states, on the one hand, and was crucial for European economies, on the other. Until the modern era, Europe remained on the periphery of the world economic system. A trade imbalance with Asia drained gold resources, which were in permanent shortage until the opening up of American supplies and Russia’s eastern expansion. The guinea coins of Britain indicate the origin of gold commonly used.

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  The Ancient World

  • Sarolta Anna Takacs, Eric H. Cline(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Legend holds that salt was traded ounce for ounce for its weight in gold, but this is probably an exaggeration, even though salt was quite valuable. This story probably arose from observers who watched the process of silent bartering used by Arab and African traders. Traders would pile their store of salt on the ground and walk away. Then other traders would stack gold near the salt. The first traders returned, and if the amount of gold was deemed sufficient, they would take it and leave the salt. It is doubtful that the piles were of equal weight or indeed that weight had anything to do with the transaction—but it probably appeared to observers that the piles were equal.

  One of the major sources of salt was the desert city of Taghaza, where slaves worked in dreadful conditions in the salt mines. Ibn Battuta, the Islamic scholar and travel writer, spent 10 days there on his way to visit the kingdom of Mali in CC.E. 1352. Most of the city's buildings were made of salt,

  Routes of the Ancient Salt Trade

  Salt has been mined in the Sahara for thousands of years. An essential component of the human diet, salt was a valuable commodity that was traded along routes that connected West Africa with North Africa. After the introduction of the camel

  by Romans in about C.E.

  300, trade expanded rapidly.

  which may conjure images of a beautiful, white crystal city. To the contrary, Taghaza's salt buildings were a drab gray, badly pitted by desert winds, with roofs made of camel skins. Battuta described Taghaza as "the most fly-ridden of places" and complained that even the water was salty. Moroccan forces destroyed Taghaza in the sixteenth century C.E. , and Taoudenni replaced Taghaza as the area's leading producer of salt.

  To this day, Berber Touareg tribesmen still cut blocks of salt from the earth in Taoudenni and still travel in caravans to Timbuktu to sell it, though for much less than it once brought.

  See also: Berbers ; Ghana ; Ibn Battuta ; Mali ; Songhai Empire .

  Further Reading

  Benanav, Michael. Crossing the Sahara on the Caravan of White Gold . Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2006.

  Kurlansky, Mark. Salt: A World History

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  Trading the Fruits of the Land

  Horticultural Marketing of the Land

  • Tjalling Dijkstra(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Although local trade in Sub-Saharan Africa had its own rationale, it was connected to long-distance trading through the sale of supplies to passing caravans and, to a lesser extent, through the distribution of goods that caravans delivered. People along the caravan routes found it profitable to produce crops for sale, and when commercial contacts increased it became easier to make up for local deficiencies through trade (Gray & Birmingham, 1970; Hopkins, 1973).

  In addition to local trade, two other types of trade were connected to the regionally determined long-distance trade networks. The first was specific for West Africa and concerned trans-Saharan trade. The internal system of long-distance trade in West Africa made the development of trans-Saharan trade possible (Mokhtar, 1990). Dating back as far as 1000 BC, it included a large range of items, but few of them were food. Gold, slaves, expensive cloth, pepper, ivory, kola nuts, leather goods, and in the 19th century ostrich feathers, were carried to the north, while textiles, copper, preserved foodstuffs, glassware, beads and miscellaneous 'fancy goods' went south (Hopkins, 1973).

  The second type of trade that made use of existing regional networks was the overseas trade. Both the trade with the Arab Mediterranean world and the Atlantic trade inserted themselves into existing regional and even local networks (Coquery-Vidrovitch, 1991).

  Overseas trade

  The Portuguese were the first to open up trans-Atlantic trade routes from West Africa in the late 15th century, followed by the French, Danish, Dutch and British in the 17th century (Gugler & Flanagan, 1978).12 Until the 19th century the main exports from West Africa were slaves, gold, ivory, timber, dyewoods, beeswax, gum, leather, indigo and pepper (Meillassoux, 1971; Northrup, 1978, Hopkins, 1973). Slave trade became the prime focus in the 18th century, causing local warfare, disorder and even the rise of an entirely new state on the Slave Coast (Dahomey).13

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  A Different Vision

  Race and Public Policy, Volume 2

  • Thomas D Boston(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  18

  At the same time, commodity exchanges with the Islamicized Sudan, Bilad al Sudan [Arabic, meaning land of the blacks], were extensive, and the study of the economic life of the great Sudanic empires of Ghana, Mail, and Songhay from the eleventh through the sixteenth centuries is important. With procolonial West Africa, these were complementary economic trade regions, and commerce in the Sudan existed not in isolation from that of the Guinea coastal states, but as a part of an interconnected West African economic unit. As it was, European greed to secure sub-Saharan trade commodities from West Africa, thus avoiding Arab middle men costs, propelled their exploration of Guinea Coast Africa.

  In his discussion of the economic history of Africa, Ralph Austen describes the degree to which trade connections along the upper Guinea Coast in both precontact and precolonial West Africa had been either established with Sudanic trans-Saharan markets or were integrated into the Sudanic commercial world. As he indicates, the Senegambia-Upper Guinea region was “a direct extension of the Western Sudanic savanna although somewhat distant from its main economic and political centre of the Middle Niger.” The forest regions of the Gold Coast and the Bight of Benin, he adds were “strongly linked to the Sudanic economy but never fully assimilated to it.” Of the remaining three zones, located east and south of the Niger River and its coastal delta, the Bight of Biafra, Gabon-Congo and Angola, Austen said that “Sudanic contacts disappear entirely.”19

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  The Scandinavian Early Modern World

  A Global Historical Archaeology

  • Jonas Monié Nordin(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The material objects handled on the West African Coast entangled the Gold Coast with Copenhagen, Stockholm, the Baltic, and the Atlantic. The things wanted by the people of European, African, or mixed background were the raison d’être of the trade. Europeans coveted gold, ivory, and slaves; Africans coveted textile, metals, and metal products but also the East Asian and Indian goods – the textiles, precious objects, ceramics, and spices – that were circulated through European trade networks centred in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Lisbon, and London. This trade, and the negotiations on which they were founded, has left a tangible archaeological landscape on the coast.

  The Swedish–Ghanaian (The Fante, Fetu, and Ga) Dutch, and Danish history of the 1640s to the 1660s, includes this multitude of agents and brokers who were active on various levels in the everyday exchange. The process whereby luxury trade in gold and ivory was transformed into a large-scale slave trade to produce yet another luxury commodity, such as sugar or tobacco, is fundamental for the shaping of modern societies. Here are four cornerstones of capitalism: industrialization, commodification, colonialism, and globalization.

  The very fetish-relation, reification of commodities central to capitalist society, could not have developed as it did without access to cheap commodities manufactured by the manual labour of African slaves – in Africa, but more important in South America, the Caribbean, and North America. The cheap cocoa, coffee, cotton, rice, and tobacco consumed daily in Europe and North America over the past 200 years would not have prevailed had it not been for the slave economy. Modernity rests not only on the mechanical wheels of Northern England or the salon des discussions in Paris but on the ivory figurines and sugar lumps of West Africa (cf. Williams 1944).

  A shared European–Ghanaian–West-African history emphasizes Scandinavian interest in African trade in a global framework. The emphasis is on local interaction, spatial strategies, and global connections. Brokering as a mean of endorsing trade is a governing perspective in this chapter. On both the African and European sides, brokers were organizing activities of social interaction and change (De Cunzo 2004:7–21). The Danish–Swedish War of 1657–1660, which started in the Southern Baltic and soon spread to the Gold Coast and Sápmi, ended the Swedish territorial entanglement with West Africa and led to the beginning of Danish colonial rule. Activities on the Gold Coast unfolded concurrent with economic and political events in the New Sweden Colony, but even more specifically in Northern Scandinavia and Sápmi.

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