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THOUGHTS ON THE WESTERN SAVANNAH AND SAHEL

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2021

Michael A. Gomez*
Affiliation:
New York University

Abstract

A recent revival of interest in the empires of the medieval western Savannah and Sahel has generated new insights into slavery, ethnicity, race, and gender in precolonial West Africa. New histories of medieval West Africa also expand the spatial frame through which the relationship between the region's polities and the broader world can be understood. This essay offers a survey of that literature.

Type
FORUM: The Imperial Tradition in the Sahel
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

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14 See Gomez, African Dominion, esp. ch. 11.

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16 This is consistent with Burbank and Cooper's definition of empires as ‘large units, expansionist or with a memory of power . . . that maintain distinction and hierarchy as they incorporate new people. . . . The concept of empire presumes that different peoples within the polity will be governed differently’; see Burbank, J. and Cooper, F., Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, 2010), 8Google Scholar.

17 See Fernandes, V., Description de la Côte d'Afrique de Ceuta au Sénégal (Paris, 1938), 84–5Google Scholar.

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