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This study analyzes the actors, networks, and commercial routes that structured the trans-Saharan slave trade during the Soninke and Manding empires (8th–13th centuries) through a critical examination of Arabic-Islamic sources, including alYaʿqūbī, al-Idrīsī, Ibn al-Fakīh, and Ibn Ḥawqal, supplemented by modern historiography. While the trade predated Islam, it intensified significantly following Arab-Berber expansion into the Sahel, operating through collaboration between Sudanese rulers who organized slave raids and market provisioning, and Maghrebi and Eastern merchants (particularly Ibadite Berbers) who established purchasing posts, financed caravans, and secured desert passage. Three principal itineraries channeled enslaved populations northward: the western Tahert–Sijilmassa–Awdaghost–Ghana axis; the Tripoli–Zawila–Kanem corridor linking Fezzan to Lake Chad; and an Egypt–Ghana route traversing Gao, Kawar, and the Kharga/Dakhla oases. Religious-legal discourse, notably the equation of unbelief (kufr) with enslavability, as articulated in Aḥmad Bābā's legal opinions, and elite demand for luxury commodities sustained capture and exchange, with urban centers like Koumbi Saleh, Awdaghost, Gao, and Zawila serving as nodal points. By correlating political chronologies with documented caravan geography, the research illuminates how state authority, commercial mediation, and desert infrastructure converged to transform localized enslavement into systematic trans-Saharan labor traffic supplying North Africa and the Middle East.
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During the reign of the Banu Midrar (140–366 AH / 757–976 CE), the city of Sijilmasa witnessed significant economic development in various aspects, particularly in trade. This study focuses on the role played by the Banu Midrar in revitalizing commercial caravan routes and organizing trade networks during their rule. It also highlights their efforts to establish extensive trade relations with the Eastern Islamic world, North Africa, al-Andalus, and Sub-Saharan Africa, with gold being one of the most prominent commodities exchanged. The researcher adopted an analytical inductive approach to examine historical events and facts and to understand the motivations behind the imposition of taxes and customs on land and maritime trade by the Banu Midrar, which contributed to elevating Sijilmasa’s global commercial status during the 2nd to 4th centuries AH (8th to 10th centuries CE). Additionally, the researcher employed the descriptive method to trace and analyze historical developments, while also incorporating other scientific methodologies where necessary. This approach led to findings that underscore the pivotal role of the Banu Midrar Emirate in the flourishing of trade in Sijilmasa.
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Land and Trade in Early Islam discusses the latest developments in the field of early Islamic economic and social history, and explores the notion of polycentrism and the dialectic between global and local between 700 and 1050 CE. The volume explores the political mechanisms and the role of Islamic states in regulating and developing demand in the economy. The chapters question the binary of core/periphery, and demonstrate how the growing scholarship on the liminal regions of the Caliphate has transformed our understanding of the early Islamic world by offering a more nuanced picture of its regional urban and socio-economic dynamics. Changes in the peripheries of the early medieval Caliphate have traditionally been conceived as resulting from initiatives by the core. An increased focus on the comparatively under-explored regions in central Asia, north Africa, south-east Asia and the Caucasus has thrown this into question. Land and Trade in Early Islam draws on this growing body of scholarship to question the notion of peripherality, explore lines of economic influence and interdependence, and to better understand the regional economic, social and political dynamics of this period.
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