I. HINTERLANDS REACT TO SUDDEN GROWTH

RUDIMENTARY ECONOMIES MAKE ITS EFFECTS STAND OUT

Mid-19th-century Timbuktu and mid-15th century Paris were   backwaters compared to the towns of Italy, the Middle East, India and China.

• Yet in 1850 West African production was expanding, and states had emerged in the most commercial regions (west of Lake Chad and along the Senegal and Niger Rivers)...

 "Arrival at Timbuktu," Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa by Henrich Barth, 1855 / zoom (color added)

Timbuktu: soldiers accompany the caravan because authority is weak and routes unsafe. 

• And by 1450 France, recovered from the plague and the ravages of the Hundred Years' War, was undergoing a gradual economic growth that slowly-centralizing royal power contained. 

Louis II of Anjou arrives in Paris, "Chronicle of Jean Froissart," toward 1475 / zoom 

Paris: the north-south route looks like a country path.

• But upheavals brewed:

• In West Africa, the Atlantic slave trade buttressed archaic elites, slowing the rise of producers independent of them. Its end let those producers sweep away out-of-date entities social upheaval that economic destabilization provoked. The result was the rise of dynamic economies, which Islamic theocracies both protected and controlled. The colonial conquerors' liberating the slaves to install their own economies brought that transformation to an end. 

• In France, the geographic discoveries of the end of the 15th century would bring unprecedented economic growth. There too, social upheaval would bring the new interests' victory and a stronger state to control them, until the only way to do so was to erase them. 

We now turn to 

how those economies worked. 

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Next,
I.
Braking the search for gain