Gold-Salt Trade

4 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)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (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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  Societies and Nature in the Sahel

  • Philippe Lavigne Delville, Emmanuel Gregoire, Pierre Janin, Jean Koechlin, Claude Raynaut(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Sustained trade has linked the Sahel with North Africa for many centuries. It contributed to the birth of large market cities, such as Kumbi Saleh, Oualata, Jenne, Gao, Tombouctou, Agades, Zinder, Katsina and Kano. It was in these cities, in contact with southern Morocco, Tripoli and sometimes even Egypt, that journeys were broken and goods exchanged. From the Sahel, camel caravans exported gold, ivory, cotton and ostrich feathers, as well as slaves (until the middle of the eighteenth century). From North Africa or Europe they imported crafts, horses and arms that allowed states to maintain their hegemony and to control these very trade movements. The first of these was most likely the Kingdom of Ghana, which originated in the fourth century as a result of the development of trade between the Sudan and North Africa by way of Western Sahara. Ghana was succeeded by the empires of Mali (thirteenth and fourteenth centuries) and later Gao (fifteenth and sixteenth centuries), the powers of which rested on the gold trade, and then later by the Hausa states, where the merchants were linked to those of the Arab world, and finally by the empire of Bornou for which political and economic expansion originated, in part, from its relations with the Mediterranean (Libya, Egypt) through the Fezzan (Suret-Canale, 1968–72). War and trade were thus often complementary, with the former feeding the latter. Similarly, commerce and Islam were closely linked, with Islam’s spread from North Africa following the commercial routes into the Sahel (Meillassoux, 1971).

  While trade across the desert was important, other trades were also developing towards the south, including salt, natron, iron, fabrics, leather articles and dried onions. Even dates from the Saharan oases were exchanged for forest products. Thus the Hausa merchants wove dense networks into Gonga and Ashanti (present-day Ghana) where cola nuts were produced (Lovejoy, 1978). Kano was connected to Salaga by a whole network of way-stations and some Hausa traders, such as ‘Alhaji’ Alhassane dan Tata, the founder of a large merchant dynasty in Kano, even settled in Kumasi for several years. This southward commerce also gave birth to large market towns that acted as contact points for Sahelian and forest states. One of the most important of these was the Salaga (Ghana) market, but BoboDioulasso, Kong, Bouna, Bonduku, Kintampo and others were also notable. The Sahel was therefore bordered to the north by a series of ‘Saharan ports’? and to the south by a group of contact cities for coastal commerce. Several of these agglomerations (Kano, for example) gave birth to truly urban civilisations with populations reaching several tens of thousands by the beginning of this century.

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  Power and Landscape in Atlantic West Africa

  Archaeological Perspectives

  • J. Cameron Monroe, Akinwumi Ogundiran(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  From this account, we are to understand that in the seventeenth century West African gold “subsidized” Spain’s military occupation of the Low Countries and this gold, together with slaves, was exchanged for American sil- ver. In other words, the global circulation and exchange of African gold were essential to Spain’s military dominance in Flanders and the Netherlands. The Netherlands represents a terminus of consumption within a global gold commodity chain that stretched from the places where gold was produced, namely the Upper Niger and Upper Sene- gal basins, to sites of exchange and distribution (Marka towns) in the Middle Niger basin, across the Sahara to maritime Europe. Did the eighteenth-century Segu kingdom attempt to create a socio-natural regime, with the Sifinso as a centering institution, in order to dominate the sites of gold production and distribution? There is another commercial context that throws light on the global exchange of West African gold. In the concluding chapter of his magisterial study of the seventeenth-century Indian Ocean world, Dutch historian R. J. Barendse relates that seventeenth-century trade between Europe and Asia was dominated by American silver and African gold (Barendse 2002:491). He expounds further that there were periods, for example, in the early sixteenth century and in the 1670s, when West African gold financed European commercial opera- tions in India and other parts of Asia. What are the material represen- tations of this commercial relationship in the archaeological record? What can excavated sites tell us about the global exchange of West African gold if the sites are viewed with reference to a Mediterranean and Indian Ocean dimension? 367 world-historical connections Barendse brings attention to another matter of substance. Even in the great “boom” period of the Atlantic slave trade, he notes, the trans-Saharan trade too was “booming” and was not in decline, contrary to a widespread viewpoint.

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