mounted on a camel, dressed in the characteristic turban and veil of Saharan Berbers. The map conveys the message that he is one of our allies—a generous and trustworthy trading partner and a major source of gold for the coinage system of Eurasian trade. Henceforth West Africa in the minds of Europeans became legendary as a “Land of Gold.” And it was the hope of securing direct access to sub-Saharan African gold, as well as to the spice and silk trade of Asia, that propelled Portuguese mariners to explore Africa’s western coastline in the fifteenth century, thus opening up the Guinea trade and a new Atlantic era in world history.2
This chapter lays out the trading networks and protocols Europeans encountered on the Upper Guinea Coast as direct Euro-African maritime commerce developed. The major regional and interregional commodity currencies of West Africa, originally tied to trans-Saharan trade, would be deployed in new directions and along new axes while Europeans added greater supplies of them, thus reshaping the structure and intensifying the dynamics of commercial operations between the coast and interior regions. At the same time, the business of trading and how it was carried out tended to follow well-established patterns and arrangements that had existed for hundreds of years. Added to familiar ways of calculating measures and values came new ones from the Atlantic. With the arrival of Europeans—first the Portuguese in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, then the Dutch, English, and French in the 1600s—this new Euro-African commercial zone expanded on local African practices while at the same time creating new networks and patterns of trade.
Money: Commodity Currencies
Much of the system that Portuguese caravels skirting Africa’s north Atlantic coastline in the fifteenth century were entering was in the hands of specialist Muslim merchant groups known generally as Juula. Based mainly in regions along the southern shore of the Sahara, Juula merchants created extensive trade diasporas that linked major trans-Saharan routes with myriad local, regional, and interregional networks to the south.3 Evidence from archaeological sites and from Arabic written sources provides a general indication of just how extensive these networks were, reaching overland and along rivers to connect towns and cities in the grasslands and forests there with the primary entrepôts of Saharan caravan traffic. Prominent among the surviving material remains of this commercial system are foreign manufactures that crossed the desert and found their way as far as the tropical rainforests, well before the arrival of the Portuguese. For example, two archaeological sites at Igbo-Ukwu (in modern southeast Nigeria) are especially significant on this score. Among the priestly burial, regalia, and treasure unearthed at those sites is a spectacular trove of over 165,000 trade beads from the Mediterranean and Asia. Dating to the ninth or tenth century, the sites provide us with general temporal markers for the economic history of West Africa. They indicate that on the eve of the second millennium communities deep in the rainforest belt were indirectly linked with avenues of trans-Saharan trade, receiving beads that came from distant towns in Africa or beyond.4
MAP 1.1 Places mentioned in chapter 1. Map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP.
This material evidence also presents visually dazzling corroboration of the rather cursory references to trade beads in the Arabic-language written sources. There is, however, an important caveat: the beads themselves are of only limited use in identifying specifically where they came from. Red beads made of carnelian, for example, which were found at both Igbo Ukwu and Gao, might have been from Gao itself or, alternatively, from other known supply centers as far away as Egypt or India. Monochrome glass beads found in those same sites and others could have been from Morocco, Egypt, or the Near East, which were the major known suppliers of such beads between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries.5 Whatever their precise origins, however, beads from these early archaeological sites are important historical sources for understanding West Africa as a socially diverse zone of bead connoisseurship that persisted into and during the era of Atlantic trade with Europeans.
Commercial exchanges depended on various forms of West African currencies—what they were, how they were valued, and specifically where and how they circulated. It is important to note that during the centuries of trans-Saharan trade, West African merchants did not adopt coinage from North Africa as a general form of currency south of the desert, although limited numbers of gold dinars and silver dirhams did at times circulate in some cities and towns. Instead, they continued to use commodity currencies, the major West African ones being gold dust, rock salt, cotton textiles, bar iron, and sea salt, along with cowry shells from the Indian Ocean. These items served as general-purpose currencies largely because demand for them was widespread, steady, and consistently high. They were important as trade goods and also functioned as money, being used as a medium of exchange, as a store of value, and as units of account in valuation and pricing. Each had its own history. Some were products rooted in local natural resource endowments, and some were the products of far-off contacts and cultural influences arising out of long-standing ties with the wider Islamic world. Sufficiently detailed histories of these currencies are not yet possible owing to the very limited written and archaeological sources for documenting them, but there is no doubt that they worked together over time as a flexible, fluctuating, and interlocking system of currency flows across West Africa’s geographical and linguistically rich social landscape.
The largest regional currency zone, extending over much of the West African interior, owed its existence to the importance of the trans-Saharan caravan trade. In this zone people reckoned prices and exchanged goods based on units of African gold, imported cowry shells, and Saharan rock salt. The other three currencies—cotton textiles, bar iron, and sea salt—circulated in and between smaller subregions and also into and out of Muslim trading networks. Sea salt produced along the coast was regularly sought out by inland merchants, especially those who had ready access to the strips of woven cotton cloth that artisans in the savanna and Sahel zones produced for export. Salt producers on the coast, for their part, preferred to bargain for cotton textiles, which were also accepted in exchange for gold in gold-producing areas and for captive humans in other places. Blacksmiths with access to locally smelted iron, either directly or by trade, worked it out into standard-sized units that Europeans called “bar iron,” which then circulated as local and regional currencies in markets across West Africa.6
Combining the known production centers and circulation zones of these commodity currencies and plotting them on a map of West Africa presents a useful summary overview of the complexity of trade and commerce there ca. 1500. Map 1.2 includes the richest goldfields and Saharan rock-salt deposits, the central zone of cowry circulation, and major production centers of bar iron and cotton textiles for export. Coastal sea salt–producing areas were many and changing and so are not individually shown. In addition, the map shows prominent supply areas of kola nuts, mainly because of their importance in linking the forest zones where they grew to consumer markets for them in the savanna and Sahel regions. There they were of great cultural and social value—as well as being a source of caffeine—and served as a respectable welcoming gift among many peoples, Muslims and polytheists alike. However, since they were perishable and therefore difficult to store for very long, they were a consumer product and not, strictly speaking, a major currency-like store of value. The map also includes areas of copper extraction, but the volume of production and circulation of local copper was relatively limited, thus setting up a significant opportunity for European importers of the metal and its alloys, brass and bronze. The basic spatial organization and material logic of West Africa’s trading networks shown in the map allows for a sharper recognition and appreciation of Africa’s participation in early modern Atlantic trade.
MAP 1.2 Production and circulation of commodity currencies in West Africa, ca. 1500. Map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP.
Of the six major commodity currencies, iron was probably the oldest. Early evidence for smelting iron ore comes from archaeological sites in what
