Preface vii Prologue 1 PART I EARLY SAHEL AND SAVANNAH 9 1 The Middle Niger in Pre-Antiquity and Global Context 11 2 Early Gao 19 3 The Kingdoms of Ghana: Reform along the Senegal River 30 4 Slavery and Race Imagined in Bilad As-Sudan 43 PART II IMPERIAL MALI 59 5 The Meanings of Sunjata and the Dawn of Imperial Mali 61 6 Mansa Musa and Global Mali 92 7 Intrigue, Islam, and Ibn Battuta 144 PART III IMPERIAL SONGHAY 167 8 Sunni `Ali and the Reinvention of Songhay 169 9 The Sunni and the Scholars: A Tale of Revenge 193 10 Renaissance: The Age of Askia Al-Hajj Muhammad 219 11 Of Clerics and Concubines 258 PART IV LE DERNIER DE L'EMPIRE 313 12 Of Fitnas and Fratricide: The Nadir of Imperial Songhay 315 13 Surfeit and Stability: The Era of Askia Dawud 334 14 The Rending Asunder: Dominion's End 355 Epilogue A Thousand Years 369 Notes 373 Select Bibliography 469 Index 479
Michael A. Gomez is the Silver Professor of History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. His books include Black Crescent: African Muslims in the Americas; Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South; Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora; and Pragmatism in the Age of Jihad: The Precolonial State of Bundu.
"Winner of the ASA Book Prize (Herskovits), African Studies
Association"
"Winner of the Martin A. Klein Prize, American Historical
Association"
"One of Choice Reviews' Outstanding Academic Titles of 2018"
"[A] groundbreaking study of early and medieval West Africa."
*New Yorker*
"[A] richly researched new book."---Howard French, Times Literary
Supplement
"African Dominion is an excellent, readable book on a region often
forgotten by medieval historians. Apart from his most obvious and
important contributions to gender and global history in the African
context, Gomez blazes a path for future pre-colonial
historians."---Paul A. Ludi, Origins
"Gomez deftly explores this complexity through the weaving of race,
slavery, and identity in these empires, which were much more fluid
than static. His work demonstrates not only the internal issues
that caused both the rise and fall of these empires, but also their
connections to North Africa and through that, to the larger
Eurasian world."---T.M. Reese, Choice
"Michael Gomez’s survey of this long period more than updates the
older synthesis, it revolutionizes it, transforms it, and will
surely replace all that has come before it. Gomez’s task is an
arduous one, and it requires all of its 500 pages to perform. He
carefully analyzes existing textual criticism, consulting original
language versions, integrates the oral traditions, teases out all
manner of stories and reconstructs borders and for all this, still
creates a narrative. It is a signal achievement to do this,
balancing much of the nuancing work between text and
footnotes."---John Thornton, International Journal of African
Historical Studies
"This short review cannot do justice to the variety of insights
African Dominion brings to our understanding of West African
history. . . . I imagine that Michael Gomez's achievement will set
the standard for scholarship on West Africa's empires for years to
come."---Myles Osborne, Medieval Review
"African Dominion shines new light on empire in early and medieval
West Africa and is bound to stimulate new discussions on this
pivotal period in this region’s history."---Amir Syed, Islamic
Africa
"The material [Gomez] presents is immensely appealing. It overturns
the ways that we think about
things geographically. It leaves one astounded to discover that
history could have been written for so long with such an
unawareness of the sophistication of political thinking and
political action in these areas."---Hannah Skoda, FiveBooks
"African Dominion offers valuable insight into the kinds of
materials available for analysis of the region across a time period
in excess of 600 years, and states the case for the study of
regions and peoples ostensibly assigned to the periphery. This work
is as insightful as it is extensive. . . . [and] places West
African history within the context of global flows of trade, gold
and people, but also in terms of its exegesis of the philosophy of
empires, and their constructions of ethnicity and
lineage."---Joseph Da Costa, History: Journal of the Historical
Association
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