African Dominion

The history of West Africa has long suffered from a lack of modern works offering regional syntheses for the period prior to the sixteenth century, especially in English. In the forty years since the second edition of Nehemia Levtzion’s Ancient Ghana and Mali (1973; second edn 1980), there has not been a similar regional history of the Senegal and Niger Valleys until the publication of Michael Gomez’s thought-provoking, beautifully written and much needed ‘new history’. Despite its title, the book is by no means merely an imperial history of elites, but one of diversity, both in its actors and its sources; it also provides an account of the institutional development of West African states within the Imperial region. In addition to the spatial history of power, themes of commerce, religion, race and gender remain interlinked throughout. Gomez’s history is particularly welcome for his framing of the region within an international context: he emphasises from the book’s outset the absence of engagement of current world history narratives with the ever-growing corpus of research on West Africa (p. 13)

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Context (archaeology · Dominion · Empire · Framing (construction · History of Africa · Literature · Narrative · Power (physics · World history · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History