TIMBUKTU TOWARD 1850 AND PARIS TOWARD 1450 WERE BACKWATERS COMPARED WITH THE TOWNS OF ITALY, THE MIDDLE EAST, INDIA AND CHINA
Timbuktu: Soldiers accompany a caravan because authority is weak and routes unsafe.
"Arrival at Timbuktu," Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa by Henrich Barth, 1855 / zoom (color added)
But expanding production has led to states emerging in the most commercial regions (west of Lake Chad and along the Senegal and Niger Rivers) and Timbuktu will soon be part of a powerful theocracy.*
* Africa's slower economic growth was due first to climate zones that hampered the spread of agricultural improvements,* then to the states that supplied the Atlantic slave trade and slowed the rise of commercial production (Section 4, The African past revisited).
-- Climate zones: A Popular History of the World, from the Stone Age to the New Millenium
by Chris Harmon, 1999, a rare account to connect economic and political change.
Paris: The north-south trade route looks like a country path.
But France has recovered from the Black Death and the Hundred Years' War and the economy is slowly growing. Explorations and discoveries are about to bring a commercial expansion that will provoke religious and political upheaval... .
To understand the effect
of that sudden growth,
grasp how those societies functioned
and how they replied.
* * *
