Shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize, Cundill History Prize, Fage and Oliver Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Pius Adesanmi Memorial Award
Winner of the Historical Writers'' Association Non-Fiction Crown 2020
Winner of the American Historical Association''s Jerry Bentley Prize in World History 2020
Winner of the Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding 2019
An Observer and Wall Street Journal Book of the Year 2019
A groundbreaking history that will transform our view of West Africa
By the time of the ''Scramble for Africa'' in the late nineteenth century, Africa had already been globally connected for many centuries. Its gold had fuelled the economies of Europe and Islamic world since around 1000, and its sophisticated kingdoms had traded with Europeans along the coasts from Senegal down to Angola since the fifteenth century. Until at least 1650, this
