Sahara

[Photo credit: aterracielo]

About the Book

Ghislaine Lydon. “On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa”. Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 2009. xxviii + 468 pp. $95.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-88724-3.

Book Review

Citation: Anissa Helie. Review of Lydon, Ghislaine, “On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa”. H-Law, H-Net Reviews. February, 2010.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=25745

Reviewed by Anissa Helie (John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY), Published on H-Law (February, 2010), Commissioned by Michael J. Pfeifer

A Bountiful Desert: Trade and Culture within and across the Sahara

“On Trans-Saharan Trails” successfully delivers on its author’s ambitious promises. Ghislaine Lydon pledges to challenge the long-standing divide between North and sub-Saharan Africa that led to a “disregard [of] North Africa’s ‘African’ roots” (p. 5) in African studies. Given the overall paucity of scholarship focusing on the Saharan region and the quality of the research, this book will certainly bridge the gap and contribute to a deeper understanding of the Sahara “as a dynamic space with a deep history” (p. 4).

Through an analysis of the [garbled] trade network (based in the northern tip of Western Sahara) Lydon focuses on a region which was islamicized early and was “less affected by colonial rule.” By recalling the testimonies of a “dying breed” (p. 28)–the caravaners–the book evokes the risky nature of their business, as they face deadly sandstorms, unforgiving heat, ongoing threats of pillages and murders, or increased regional instability due to jihads in the second half of the nineteenth century. This endemic insecurity sometimes had dramatic human and economic consequences (for example, five hundred camels were seized one single raid in 1875-76, p. 406). More broadly, the book examines the extent to which cross-cultural exchange and business ventures were facilitated by institutional frameworks inspired by literacy and a Muslim legal culture.

The author consulted sources in Morocco, Mauritania, Mali, Senegal, and Libya, visiting over thirty-five private libraries and national archives. She also conducted over two hundred interviews and rightly insists on the centrality of orality. Apart from the wealth of oral testimonies, the diversity of written primary sources (contracts, “fatwa”s, estates, pilgrims’ accounts, but also colonial ethnography) is impressive, ensuring a multiplicity of perspectives. The book is divided into eight coherent chapters, and offers several maps, a glossary, and useful appendices (including a timeline and a list of interviewees.) Throughout the entire book, Lydon zooms in and out with ease, linking anecdotal details to larger contextual trends. “On Trans-Saharan Trails” will appeal to those interested in legal history, economic history, cultural history, world history, and African history, and to scholars of Muslim societies.

Read the full review

Suggested Books (US)

• On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa
• Trans-Saharan Africa in World History (New Oxford World History)

Suggested Books (UK)

• On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-century Western Africa
• Trans-Saharan Africa in World History (New Oxford World History)