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On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa. By ghislaine lydon. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 496 pp. $99.00 (cloth); $76.00 (e-book).
Ghislaine Lydon has written a history of trans-Saharan trade that is both comprehensive and highly sophisticated. It will serve as a principal reference for those interested in the Sahara, and it will gain a place in the larger literature on early modern commercial networks around the globe.
Lydon's book is the first in-depth examination of Saharan commerce in many decades. To a much greater extent than other work on the trans-Saharan slave trade, which has relied heavily on European consular and colonial sources, Lydon bases her work on written and oral sources produced within the Saharan commercial networks themselves. Because of this, she is able to trace the internal social and cultural logics of different Saharan trading networks, showing how this difficult and dangerous commerce actually functioned historically. This is no small feat. It is this aspect of the book that is most original and exciting.
The book is a history of the commercial networks that crossed the western end of the Sahara (in the modern-day countries of Morocco, Mauritania, Senegal, and Mali). It focuses in particular on groups of traders who originated in the northern Saharan region of Wad Nun and who organized camel caravans that moved south through Mauritania and ultimately to the market towns of the Middle Niger Valley and the Niger Bend in West Africa. There is an extensive overview of the long history of commercial crossings of the Sahara, but the focus of the analysis is on the...