On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa (review)

On Trans-Saharan Trails focuses on a commercial network operating between the southern Maghreb and West Africa. It eschews facile oppositions between northern and sub-Saharan Africa, offers insights into the organization of trans-Saharan trade, and seeks to understand the role of Islam in facilitating commerce in a decentralized political context. Lydon's research is prodigious: she consulted Arabic materials in more than thirty-five public and private collections and conducted interviews with more than two hundred informants. In a sophisticated analysis of her sources, she notes that "orality is in all forms of evidence" (46), a perspective that leads to insightful readings across the grain of her texts.

The commercial network under study is based in the Wad Nun region of southern Morocco. Organized by the Tikna confederation of Hasaniya Arabic-speakers and their allies—others claiming Amazigh ("Berber") identities as well as Jewish merchants residing at the Wad Nun market town of Guelmim—the trading diaspora moved cloth, salt, slaves, tea, paper, and other commodities across the Sahara. The events of the tumultuous nineteenth century—including religious wars in West Africa and European imperialism on both sides of the desert—added to the challenges: Saharan merchants innovated in response to these hazards, organizing smaller, more mobile caravans in place of the larger ones that crossed the Sahara in earlier centuries. Lydon also demonstrates that some Saharan women organized commercial operations at market towns, traded across the Sahara by proxy, managed the estates of their dead husbands, and, in a few cases, actually traveled with the caravans. The book also provides fascinating discussions of the links among commerce, Islamic revival, and cultural practices such as Muslim burials and tea-drinking.

Lydon argues that trust among Saharan merchants was bolstered through the writing of contracts and other Arabic documents. She employs the term "paper economy of faith" to reference a cluster of religious values and social practices, including Arabic literacy and the jurisprudence of Muslim legal scholars, which gained salience during an era of Islamic revival and reform. Lydon situates expanding contractual relations in a context in which texts functioned as material representations of oral agreements and Muslim scholars invoked Islamic legal principles placing authority in oral testimony over documents. Given that witnesses could be separated by thousands of miles, litigants and Muslim scholars pursued various strategies in an effort to resolve disputes. Lydon concludes that even as written contracts encouraged trust between trading partners, the authority of oral testimony over documents constrained the founding of enduring collaborative enterprises along the lines of European firms. Lydon's insights on the "paper economy of faith" are multiple, although she might have investigated more fully the broader implications of growing Arabic literacy at a time of Muslim revival in the Sahara.

This amply documented and well-conceived book merits a broad readership. Its wide scope and detailed analysis of trans-Saharan trade sets a new standard. Its discussion of women's commercial activities is most welcome and should inform future research. Lydon's reflections on the connections among trust, commerce, literacy, and Islamic law reveal the complex cultural dynamics underlying the generalization, based on Abner Cohen's seminal essay "Cultural Strategies in the Organization of Trading Diasporas (in Development of Indigenous Trade and Markets West Africa, Oxford, 1971), that Islam provided a "blueprint" for trading diasporas. This book is a most deserving inaugural recipient of the American Historical Association's Martin A. Klein Prize in African History.