Description
Book SynopsisThe Peoples of the Middle Niger This book provides the first comprehensive history of the peoples of the Middle Niger written by an English-speaking scholar. The Island of Gold' was the medieval Muslim and later European name for a fabled source of gold and other tropical riches. Although the floodplain of the Niger river lies far from the goldfields, the mosaic of peoples along the Middle Niger created a wealth of grain, fish, and livestock that supported some of Africa's oldest cities, including Timbuktu. These ancient cities of the region that came to be known as Western Sudan were founded without outside stimulation and their inhabitants long resisted the coercive, centralized state that characterized the origins of earliest towns elsewhere.
In this book, Roderick James McIntosh uses the latest archaeological and anthropological research to provide a bold overview of the distant origins of life for the inhabitants of the Middle Niger, and an explanation for the
Trade Review
"McIntosh's contribution is an immensely scholarly and in some ways a subversive book. The great strength of McIntosh's book is in its implicit demand that we re-examine the comfortable old taxonomies." History Today
"A splendid achievement ... this volume sets a new standard of thoroughness in the presentation of West African history." Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
Table of ContentsList of Plates.
List of Figures.
List of Maps.
Preface.
1. Riches Beyond Lucre, The Island of Gold.
2. The Dry Basins of the Middle Niger.
3. Historical Imagination: 4100 BP.
4. Peoples of the Four Live Basins.
5. Historical Imagination: 300 BC.
6. Penetration of the Deep Basins.
7. Historical Imagination: AD 400.
8. Prosperity and Cities.
9. Historical Imagination: AD 1000.
10. The Imperial Tradition.
11. Historical Imagination: AD 1472.
12. Epilogue: Resilience of an Original Civil Society?.
Bibliography.
