A groundbreaking history that puts early and medieval West Africa in a global contextPick up almost any book on early and medieval world history and empire, and where do you find West Africa? On the periphery. This pioneering book, the first on this period of the region's history in a generation, tells a different story. Interweaving political and social history and drawing on a rich array of sources, including Arabic manuscripts, oral histories, and recent archaeological findings, Michael Gomez unveils a new vision of how categories of ethnicity, race, gender, and caste emerged in Africa and in global history more generally. Scholars have long held that such distinctions arose during the colonial period, but Gomez shows they developed much earlier.Focusing on the Savannah and Sahel region, Gomez traces the exchange of ideas and influences with North Africa and the Central Islamic Lands by way of merchants, scholars, and pilgrims. Islam's growth in West Africa, in tandem with intensifying commerce that included slaves, resulted in a series of political experiments unique to the region, culminating in the rise of empire. A major preoccupation was the question of who could be legally enslaved, which together with other factors led to the construction of new ideas about ethnicity, race, gender, and caste-long before colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade.Telling a radically new story about early Africa in global history, African Dominion is set to be the standard work on the subject for many years to come.

Preface viiPrologue 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 Ba¿¿u¿a 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-¿ajj Mu¿ammad 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