ABSTRACT
Since the publication of the first version of this chapter (Insoll 2001), the place of West Africa in the medieval world has become much more firmly established in scholarship (e.g. Haour 2007; Guérin 2010, 2013), and our knowledge of the great states and urban centres of the West African Sahel has increased substantially. Equally, using the term ‘medieval’ is no longer qualified as it was in the previous version (Insoll 2001: 469) for though inappropriate to African chronology, following Moraes Farias (2003: xxiii), it, like the ‘Middle Ages’ is a ‘dead metaphor’ and as such can be used as a ‘transferable chronological’ module outside its ‘original frame of reference’. This chapter will review recent research and contextualise it in relation to what it tells us about these polities and their interactions with their neighbours, North Africa, the wider Islamic world, and beyond.
