La Decouverte de l'Afrique au Moyen Age. Cartographes et explorateurs

La Decouverte de l'Afrique au Moyen Age. Cartographes et explorateurs.Charles de la Ronciere. Tome Ier, L'Intdrieur du Continent. Tome IIe, Le Periple du Continent. Ouvrage publie sous les auspices de S.M. Fouad 1er, Roi d'ftgypte. Cairo: Societe Royale de Geographie d'lgypte. I925. I41 X II, pp. viii. + I75, 145. Maps and Illustrations. These handsome volumes, adorned with many beautiful reproductions of mediaeval maps and some excellent colour plates, are a tribute to the munificence of the King of Egypt, who gave the commission for them, and to the schoXarship of their author, the erudite historian of the French Navy. The occasion of their production was the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the Geographical Society of Egypt, and the suggestion originally came from the late Adolphe Cattaui Bey, delegate to the centenary of the Societe de Geographie de Paris in I92I. The funds for the work were specially provided by the King, and the Society was especially fortunate in persuading M. de la Ronciere to undertake it, for no scholar is better fitted by experience or intellectual equipment for the task. Few problems in the history of geographical discovery present more tantalizingly fragmentary evidence or more baffling difficulties of interpretation than does Africa before the great modern era of exploration that began in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Mediaeval knowledge of the interior of the continent derived directly from the ancients, but a gap of darkness separates it from the modern world, so that the subject, while ill defined in one direction, is sharply limited in the other. Knowledge of the coast-line was almost entirely lacking in the west down to the close of the fourteenth century, but it was completely revealed within the course of the succeeding hundred years. The story of the exploration of the interior is scattered, while that of the coast is a single episode, and the method of treatment in two separate parts adopted by M. de la Ronciere was therefore inevitable. But the work is disconnected even within the bounds of each section. The first volume consists of a series of essays that are almost independent of each other, and it is difficult to glean from them any connected idea of the development of geographical knowledge; the second treats of a much better-known story, and is little more than a recapitulation of the familiar incidents of oceanic discovery, with some acute and often illuminating comments. The range of original authorities consulted and of monographs whose results have been laid under contribution is as vast as we are accustomed to expect from our learned author, and British students will owe him a debt for introducing them to the work of many recent Continental writers whose articles might otherwise have easily been overlooked

Geography · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories

• Overland trade in the western Islamic world (fifth–ninth/eleventh–fifteenth centuries)

  Open Access•John L Meloy•New Cambridge History of Islam•2000

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• Les réseaux de la traite ibérique dans l'Atlantique nord (1440-1640)

  Open Access•António De Almeida Mendes•Annales Histoire Sciences Sociales•2008

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