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  • African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa by Michael A. Gomez
  • Jody A. Benjamin
African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa
michael a. gomez
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019; pp. 520, $29.95 paper.

For Africanists, the storied "golden age" of West African empire has long represented a counterweight to Western hegemonic claims of a timeless Africa devoid of institutional innovation and internal development. Knowledge production about ancient Ghana, Mali, and Songhay has been vital to campaigns against slavery, colonialism, racism (and even to the rise of African history in Western academia in the twentieth century), yet new historical syntheses of the period, based on original research and critical analysis of primary sources, has languished for decades. In this brilliant, meticulous study, Michael Gomez reanimates the field with a "wholly new interpretation of West Africa's early and medieval history (7)," that produces insights challenging long-held views, and argues for much wider appreciation and better integration of this history into narratives of our shared global past.

As Gomez's sixth and most ambitious book, the study marks the robust harvest of an intellectual journey he says was provoked decades ago by an experience when he was taking courses on Islamic civilization as an undergraduate transfer student at the University of Chicago. There a graduate assistant found his work in a paper on Islamic civilization in early West Africa "dubious"—a blow soft-ened by the course professor who raised the grade but advised Gomez "to learn Arabic" if he were really serious about early West Africa. The anecdote was perhaps meant to convey scholarly perseverance, which it does admirably. But it is also a reminder of the difficulties many people still have in learning West Africa's medieval history, and of the critical importance of Arabic and African languages for researchers.

The incredulity of that graduate assistant was perhaps reflected by trends in major studies of world history where there was a general omission of (or only [End Page 142] cursory references to) early West Africa in sweeping narratives of human experience and achievement—an omission that implied that little of significance took place. More recent trends in the study of empire or in "big history" have done little better, even though the emergence of urban civilizations of the middle Niger region was commensurate with developments in dynastic China, India, Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Mayans of Central America, and elsewhere.

One of the major contributions of the book is that Gomez recenters our understanding of the evolution of empire around the internal dynamics of the inland Niger delta and adjacent regions, making critical distinctions between imperial epochs and across space. He places locally produced Arabic script sources, external accounts, and oral traditions into conversation with archeological and epigraphic evidence to produce a "polyvocal" reading of a wide body of sources. The analysis benefits from his critical and comparative reading of two major histories of the region both written by scholars based at Timbuktu, Mali, under imperial Songhay, the tarikh al-fattash (ca. 1519–1665) by Mahmud Kati, and the tarikh al sudan (ca. 1652) by Abd al-Rahman al-Sadi. His familiarity with these texts and a wider corpus of Arabic documents allows him to better contextualize and, where possible, build upon their insights.

Organized in four parts, each divided into several chapters of digestible length, the book opens with an overview of ancient settlements and early kingdoms of Gao and Ghana, before moving on to separate parts on imperial Mali, imperial Songhay, and the events and circumstances leading to the fall of Songhay to a Moroccan invasion at the battle of Tondibi in 1591. Though this final conquest would have lasting consequences, Gomez finds considerable overlap between imperial epochs, showing decline was rarely a singular event. Instead of being vanquished in the eleventh century, as is often cited, Ghana reemerged with new vigor as a Muslim polity that existed at least until the fourteenth century when it became a tributary to an ascendant Mali. In turn, Songhay's territorial aspirations would not only be repeatedly challenged by Mali's rulers clinging to power, but...

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