⬅️ Project: Conquest Without Europeans · Sister: Conquest Without Europeans - Asia · Numbers: Conquest Without Europeans - Evidence Locker · Hub: 60.14 Colonialism
Africans conquering, colonizing, enslaving, and exterminating other Africans — case by case, graded for evidence quality and for how much Europe was actually involved.
Grading key
Evidence — ✅ solid · ⚠️ real event, contested magnitude or interpretation · ❌ do not use
European entanglement — 🟢 none · 🟡 marginal · 🔴 entangled
Ancient and classical Africa
Egypt’s colonization of Nubia
c. 1550–1070 BCE · New Kingdom Egypt → Kush and Lower Nubia · ✅ · 🟢
The New Kingdom pharaohs — Thutmose I, Thutmose III and their successors — pushed south past the Fourth Cataract and held Nubia for roughly five centuries. This was not raiding. It was administered colonial rule: a permanent office of Viceroy of Kush (sꜣ-nswt n Kš, “King’s Son of Kush”) governing the province, Egyptian temple-towns planted as settlement nodes at Soleb, Sesebi, Amara West and Napata, gold mines worked for the crown, and the deliberate cultural conversion of the Nubian elite — Nubian princes taken to the Egyptian court, raised Egyptian, and returned as loyal administrators.
If the criteria for colonialism are permanent occupation, resource extraction, settler towns, an imperial administrative class, and elite cultural assimilation, Egypt in Nubia meets every one of them, roughly three thousand years before the Berlin Conference.
Debate use: the oldest well-documented colonial system in Africa was run by Africans, on Africans.
Kush conquers Egypt — the 25th Dynasty
c. 747–656 BCE · Kush → Egypt · ✅ · 🟢
The relationship then inverted. The Kushite king Piye invaded Egypt from Napata and took it, founding the 25th Dynasty; Kushite pharaohs ruled Egypt for roughly a century until the Assyrians drove them out.
Primary source
Piye’s Victory Stele (the “Great Triumphal Stele,” from Gebel Barkal, now in Cairo) is Piye’s own account of the campaign — the sieges, the surrenders, the tribute. An African monarch’s first-person record of conquering another African civilization, carved in stone, with no European anywhere in the world aware that either country existed.
Debate use: the single cleanest demonstration that conquest ran in every direction long before Europe was a going concern.
Aksum and the end of Meroë
c. 330–350 CE · Aksum → Nubia · ⚠️ on “destroyed Meroë,” ✅ on the campaign · 🟢
King Ezana of Aksum campaigned into Nubia; his inscriptions record burning towns, killing, taking captives and cattle, and setting up a throne at the confluence of the Nile and the Atbara. The vault’s existing note is 300AD - Aksumite conquest of Kush.
The honest caveat: the popular claim that Aksum destroyed the Kingdom of Kush is contested. Meroë was already in serious decline, and a good case exists that Ezana arrived at a polity that had largely collapsed on its own, and that the “Noba” he fought were not the Meroitic state. Assert the campaign and its violence — which his own inscription describes — not the civilizational death blow.
The Arab conquests and Arabization
The Arab conquest and Arabization of North Africa
640s–11th century · Arabs → Copts, Berbers, North African Christians · ✅ · 🟢
This is the largest completed act of cultural replacement in African history, and the one most consistently exempted from the word “colonialism.”
The sequence: ‘Amr ibn al-‘As takes Egypt in 641. ‘Uqba ibn Nafi drives west and founds Kairouan around 670. The Berbers resist for decades — under Kusaila, killed around 690, and then under the Berber leader the Arab sources call al-Kahina (Dihya), killed at the end of the 690s. Berber captives are enslaved in large numbers and sent east; Berber troops are then used to conquer Spain in 711.
The Berbers noticed. The Great Berber Revolt of 740–743 was a Kharijite rising by Muslim Berbers against Arab rule, triggered explicitly by the Umayyad governors continuing to tax and take slave-tribute from fellow Muslims as though they were still conquered infidels. It is, in substance, an anti-colonial revolt against an Arab imperial centre — three centuries before the First Crusade.
What finally Arabized the countryside was not the initial conquest but the Banu Hilal migration from the mid-11th century: a mass movement of Arab tribes westward across the Maghreb.
Primary source — and it’s an African one
Ibn Khaldun, writing in 14th-century Tunis, describes the Banu Hilal’s effect on the Maghreb in terms no European colonial apologist would have dared use — a devastation of settled agriculture and urban life, tribes spreading “like a swarm of locusts.” Muqaddimah / Kitab al-‘Ibar. He is a North African Arab historian describing Arab conquest of North Africa as ruin.
The result, measurable today: Latin and Punic gone. Christianity — the church of Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine — extinct as an organized presence by roughly the 12th century. Coptic reduced to a liturgical language. Berber (Amazigh) languages pushed to mountain and desert margins and only recently granted official status in Morocco (2011) and Algeria (2016). Arabic is not indigenous to Africa; it is in Africa because of conquest.
Debate use: the strongest single case, because it is complete. Most decolonial frameworks measure colonialism by cultural displacement and population replacement. By that measure, the Arabization of North Africa is the most successful colonial project ever run on the continent — and no one is asked to decolonize from it.
✅ Verified — and the book is on your NAS
Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism: A History (Yale, 2nd ed. 2013) — — is the book-length version of this entire section’s argument, and it makes the distinction that does the most work anywhere in this project:
“Expelling occupiers from one’s patrimony is an act of self-liberation. Conquering foreign lands and subjugating their populations is pure imperialism. Neither North African Berbers fighting their Islamic conquerors nor twentieth-century Third World movements resisting European colonialism aspired to conquer the homeland of their imperial masters.”
Note what Karsh does there: he puts the Berbers resisting Arab conquest in the same category as 20th-century anti-colonial movements. That is the framing to use — not “the Arabs were bad,” but “the Berbers were colonized, and they resisted, and we have a word for that when it happens to anyone else.”
Read the Introduction (pp. 1–10) before using this section; it is the best ten pages you own for this argument. Fuller quote in Conquest Without Europeans - Asia > What you already own.
Cross → Arab Colonization · Islam Caliphates, Conquering, Colonizing · Moors · Rashidun Caliphate · Umayyad Caliphate · Abbasid Caliphate · Fatimid Caliphate
The Almohads — forced conversion in the Maghreb
1121–1269 · Almohads → Almoravids, Jews, and remaining Christians · ✅ · 🟢
Ibn Tumart’s movement declared the ruling Almoravids — fellow Muslim Berbers — to be unbelievers, which made killing them lawful. Under ‘Abd al-Mu’min the Almohads took Marrakesh in 1147 with a general massacre of the Almoravid elite.
They then did something that had not been standard practice in Islamic North Africa: they abolished the dhimmi accommodation and imposed conversion or death on Jews and the last Christians of the Maghreb and al-Andalus. This is the persecution that drove Maimonides’ family out of Córdoba around 1148 and eventually to Egypt. It finished off the last organized Christian communities in North Africa and shattered the Jewish communities of the western Islamic world.
Debate use: Africans, exterminating the religious minorities of Africa, on doctrinal grounds, with no European involved. Note also that the victims here included the previous African Muslim empire — the Almohads’ first mass killing was of other Berbers.
The Almoravids and Ghana — handle with care
1076 (claimed) · ⚠️ heavily contested · 🟢
The standard textbook line — that the Almoravids conquered and sacked the Ghana Empire’s capital in 1076 — was directly attacked by David Conrad and Humphrey Fisher, “The Conquest That Never Was: Ghana and the Almoravids, 1076” (History in Africa, vols. 9 and 10, 1982–83). They argued the Arabic sources do not actually support a conquest and that the story was assembled by later writers. Subsequent scholarship has pushed back in places, but the field has not returned to the confident old account.
The vault’s existing note 1076 - Almoravid conquest of Ghana Empire states the old version. Do not lead with it. Almoravid expansion in general — from the Senegal River to Spain — is solid; the specific sack of Ghana is not.
The West African empires
Mali — a slave-holding empire
13th–15th century · Mali → Sosso, Takrur, Gao, the Sahel · ✅ · 🟢
Sundiata Keita’s defeat of Sumanguru of Sosso (c. 1235) founded an empire that expanded by conquest over the western Sudan and ran on slave labour and slave export north across the Sahara.
Primary sources
Al-‘Umari, Masalik al-absar, compiled in Cairo in the 1330s–40s from people who had met Mansa Musa’s party, describes the 1324 hajj: the enormous retinue, the gold, and the enslaved people accompanying it.
Ibn Battuta travelled to Mali in 1352–53 and describes the court, the slaves given as gifts, and the caravan traffic north.
Debate use: the pop-culture version of Mansa Musa is “the richest man in history.” The source of the wealth was gold and a trade in human beings that ran north for centuries. Both facts come from the same documents.
Songhai — Sunni Ali and Askia Muhammad
1464–1591 · Songhai → Mali, Timbuktu, Jenne, the Mossi · ✅ · 🟢 (Tondibi 🟡)
Sunni Ali (r. 1464–92) took Timbuktu in 1468 and Jenne in 1473, breaking the Mali Empire’s hold on the Niger bend. Askia Muhammad (r. 1493–1528) declared formal jihad against the Mossi in 1498 and enslaved captives on that legal basis. The vault already has 1400 (late) - Songhai conquest of Mali Empire and 1400-1500s - Songhai conflict with Mossi states.
The most rhetorically useful primary sources in African history
The Timbuktu chronicles — the Ta’rikh al-Sudan of ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sa’di (c. 1655) and the Ta’rikh al-Fattash — are West African histories, written in West Africa, in Arabic, by West African scholars, describing West African conquest of West Africans. Al-Sa’di’s treatment of Sunni Ali is openly hostile: the chronicle records his violence against the scholars and people of Timbuktu.
These sources cannot be dismissed as colonial invention. They are the conquered civilization’s own record, written before Europeans had any presence in the interior.
The end of Songhai, 1591: the Saadian Sultan of Morocco, Ahmad al-Mansur, sent an army under Judar Pasha across the Sahara to seize the gold and salt trade. Songhai was destroyed at Tondibi. This is an African empire annihilating another African empire for control of resources — the textbook definition of an imperial resource war. Grade it 🟡 rather than 🟢 only because al-Mansur’s army carried firearms and included Andalusian and renegade European gunners; the decision, the motive, and the command were entirely Moroccan.
The Sokoto Caliphate and the Fulani jihads
1804–1903 · Fulani → Hausa states, and everyone south of them · ✅ · 🟢
Usman dan Fodio’s jihad, begun in 1804, overthrew the Hausa kingdoms — whose rulers were already Muslim, and were declared insufficiently so — and produced the Sokoto Caliphate, the largest state in 19th-century Africa, stretching across what is now northern Nigeria, Niger, and northern Cameroon. Its economy ran on slave raiding into the non-Muslim societies of the Middle Belt, on plantation slavery, and on tribute.
The number that matters
Paul Lovejoy’s work — Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge), and with Jan Hogendorn, Slow Death for Slavery: The Course of Abolition in Northern Nigeria, 1897–1936 (Cambridge, 1993) — establishes that by the end of the 19th century the Sokoto Caliphate held one of the largest enslaved populations in the world, plausibly in the low millions. Lovejoy has argued it was likely second only to the United States before emancipation, and possibly the largest anywhere by 1900.
This was built, administered, and defended by Africans, on Africans, with no European involvement in its creation.
Two other Fulani states, same pattern:
- Massina (1818) — Seku Amadu’s jihad state in the inland Niger delta.
- The Toucouleur Empire of al-Hajj Umar Tall (1850s–60s) — conquered the Bambara kingdom of Segou (1861), then turned on Massina and destroyed it (1862). A Muslim African empire conquering a Muslim African empire founded by a fellow Fulani jihadist forty years earlier.
Debate use: case #4 in the top ten, and the hardest to deflect. The reply “but Europeans created the demand” does not work — Sokoto’s slaves were held and worked internally, in the Sahel, oriented away from the Atlantic coast.
Samori Ture — hero and empire-builder
1870s–1898 · Wassoulou Empire → the Mande region · ✅ · 🟡
Samori Ture is genuinely one of the most effective anti-colonial resisters in African history; he fought the French for sixteen years. He also built his own empire by conquering his African neighbours, destroyed towns that resisted, and financed his army partly through the slave trade.
Debate use: the most useful case, because it isn’t a gotcha. It’s a demonstration that these two things are not in tension for anyone but us. Samori resisted foreign conquest and practised his own. That is what a state does.
The Atlantic-facing kingdoms — with the entanglement stated
Oyo, Dahomey, and Ashanti
c. 1700–1830s · ✅ on the events · 🔴 on the slave export, 🟢 on the internal imperialism
- Oyo → Dahomey, 1726–1730. The Oyo Empire invaded four times, burned Abomey, and reduced Dahomey to a tributary state paying annual tribute until 1823. Purely internal African imperialism, cavalry against infantry, no European role. Existing note: 1698-1730s - Oyo invasions of Dahomey.
- Ashanti → Denkyira, Battle of Feyiase, 1701 — founding a tributary empire across the Akan states, with subject peoples paying in gold, goods, and people.
- Dahomey’s Annual Customs (xwetanu) involved the ritual killing of war captives on a large scale.
State the entanglement out loud
These three states are the weakest cases to lead with, because the Atlantic market shaped what they became. Dahomey and Ashanti raided at the scale they did in part because European buyers were on the coast paying in guns.
But the reverse also holds and is worth saying plainly: the Atlantic trade could not have functioned without African states willing to supply it. Europeans very rarely raided the interior themselves — disease, logistics, and African military power prevented it. The captives were taken by African armies, from other Africans, and sold at the coast. That is not a European invention imposed on a passive continent; it is a trade, with sellers.
Cross → Heated Debate Slavery, Reparations & Colonialism with Rafe Heydel-Mankoo and Kehinde Andrews
The 19th century — Africans in the Scramble
Menelik II and the Abyssinian conquest of the south
1880s–1890s · Ethiopian Empire → Oromo, Kaffa, Wolayta, Sidama, Harar, Ogaden · ✅ · 🟡
The best modern case in Africa, and the one that most reliably stops an opponent.
While European powers were partitioning Africa, Ethiopia was doing the same thing to its neighbours — and won. Menelik II roughly doubled the territory of his empire in fifteen years: Harar (1887), Wolayta (1894, exceptionally destructive), the Kingdom of Kaffa (1897), the Sidama lands, the Ogaden. Adwa in 1896 defeated Italy and preserved Ethiopian independence; the same army and the same rifles were used to conquer the south.
And it was settler colonialism in structure, not just conquest. The conquered south was placed under the gabbar system: northern Christian Amhara and Tigrayan soldier-settlers — the neftenya, “gun-bearers” — were granted land and the labour and tribute of the local population, who worked land they had previously owned. A settler landlord class, installed by the state, over a conquered indigenous population, holding it by force of arms.
Whose framing this is
The word “colonialism” here does not come from European apologists. It comes from Oromo and southern Ethiopian scholars: Asafa Jalata, Oromia and Ethiopia: State Formation and Ethnonational Conflict (1993); Mekuria Bulcha; Bonnie Holcomb and Sisai Ibssa, The Invention of Ethiopia (1990). They describe Menelik’s expansion explicitly as Abyssinian colonialism and the neftenya-gabbar system as its settler apparatus.
This framing is contested inside Ethiopian historiography — nationalist historians describe it as reunification of previously held territory. That dispute is itself the point: it is the same argument, with the same moves, that gets made about every empire.
Ethiopian slavery: legal and widespread throughout this period. Abolition was made a condition of Ethiopia’s admission to the League of Nations in 1923; Haile Selassie issued decrees from 1924; slavery was not fully and formally abolished until 1942.
Why 🟡 and not 🟢: Menelik’s rifles were imported from European suppliers. The conquest, the settlement system, and the ideology were entirely Ethiopian.
Debate use: the pressure question — “Ethiopia participated in the Scramble for Africa as a conqueror and doubled its territory. Was Ethiopia a colonial power? Oromo historians say yes. Are they wrong?”
Egypt’s conquest of Sudan — the Turkiyya
1820–1885 · Muhammad Ali’s Egypt → Sudan · ✅ · 🟡
In 1820 Muhammad Ali sent his son Ismail south into Sudan with an explicit and openly stated objective: slaves and gold. He wanted manpower for his new conscript army. Khartoum was founded as a garrison town in 1821. The regime that followed — the Turkiyya — spent six decades raiding southward for captives, with the jihadiyya slave-soldier regiments and the ivory-and-slave zaribas pushing ever deeper into the south and west.
Then the Mahdist state, 1881–98 — which overthrew Egyptian rule and behaved no better. The Mahdi took Khartoum in 1885; under the Khalifa ‘Abdallahi, the Mahdist state invaded Ethiopia and sacked Gondar (1888), forcibly relocated populations to Omdurman, and presided over the catastrophic famine of 1889 remembered as Sanat Sitta, “the Year of Six.” Its campaigns against the Nuba, Dinka, and Shilluk were devastating. Estimates that Sudan’s population halved during the Mahdiyya circulate widely — treat that number as ⚠️, the famine and the campaigns as ✅.
Why this matters more than the others: this fault line never closed. The Arab-Muslim north extracting from and enslaving the African south is a continuous line from 1820 through the two Sudanese civil wars, through Darfur and the Janjaweed, to the war that is running right now. Cross → Sudan, Wars & Genocide.
Zanzibar, Tippu Tip, and the East African raids
c. 1840–1890s · Omani-Swahili → the Great Lakes and eastern Congo · ✅ · 🟡
Sayyid Said moved the Omani capital to Zanzibar in 1840 and built a clove-plantation economy on slave labour. Inland, Swahili-Arab traders — most famously Tippu Tip (Hamad bin Muhammad el Murjebi) — ran armed caravans deep into Manyema and the eastern Congo for ivory and captives, with Nyamwezi and Yao African partners doing much of the raiding. Tippu Tip ruled a personal domain in the eastern Congo and was, briefly and absurdly, appointed a governor by Leopold’s Congo Free State.
Why 🟡: the ivory demand was partly global. The trade itself, its personnel, and its methods were Omani, Swahili, and African, and long predate European presence in the interior.
Rwanda before the Belgians
c. 1853–1895 · Nyiginya kingdom under Rwabugiri · ⚠️ · 🟢
King Kigeli Rwabugiri expanded the Rwandan kingdom aggressively in the late 19th century, subjugating smaller polities and deepening the labour and cattle-clientage obligations (ubuhake, uburetwa) that bound Hutu cultivators to Tutsi patrons.
Be precise here or you will lose the exchange
The claim “the Belgians invented the Hutu/Tutsi distinction” is too strong — the hierarchy and its labour obligations predate colonial rule. But the claim “the Belgians had nothing to do with it” is also wrong. Mahmood Mamdani (When Victims Become Killers, 2001) and Catharine Newbury (The Cohesion of Oppression, 1988) argue convincingly that colonial rule froze a fluid, regionally variable, partly permeable status system into a rigid racial classification, stamped it on identity cards, and staffed the state from one side of it.
The defensible version: the hierarchy is African and pre-colonial; its racialization and bureaucratic hardening are colonial. Say that, and you cannot be ambushed.
Merina Madagascar
1810–1861 · Merina kingdom → Sakalava, Bara, and the rest of the island · ⚠️ on the tolls · 🟡
Radama I unified most of Madagascar by conquest. Ranavalona I (r. 1828–61) ruled through forced labour (fanompoana), the tangena poison ordeal used as a judicial instrument on a large scale, and repeated punitive campaigns against non-Merina peoples with mass enslavement of captives. The serious scholarship is Gwyn Campbell, An Economic History of Imperial Madagascar, 1750–1895 (Cambridge, 2005).
Specific mortality figures for this reign vary enormously between sources and many trace back to hostile missionary accounts — assert the system, not the numbers.
The Mfecane — the case you should handle carefully
c. 1815–1840 · Zulu and successor states → southern Africa · ⚠️ severely · 🔴 disputed
Shaka’s military reorganization of the Zulu and the wave of warfare and displacement that followed is the case people reach for first, and it is the weakest one in this file. See Conquest Without Europeans - Evidence Locker > The Mfecane problem for the full account of why. Short version: Julian Cobbing, “The Mfecane as Alibi” (Journal of African History, 1988) argued the whole concept was constructed to present southern Africa as self-depopulated and therefore open to white settlement, and that European and Griqua slave-raiding out of Delagoa Bay was a major driver. Cobbing’s thesis has itself been substantially criticised — by Elizabeth Eldredge, John Wright, and in Carolyn Hamilton’s edited volume The Mfecane Aftermath (1995) — but the field did not go back to the old story.
What survives: Zulu state formation was violent and conquered its neighbours; the Ndebele under Mzilikazi migrated north and subjugated the Shona; the Kololo moved into Barotseland. What does not survive: “one to two million dead,” and “purely internal.” Do not use either.
The slave trades that were not Atlantic
7th–20th century · ✅ that they existed and were vast · ⚠️ on all totals · 🟢
Three systems moved enslaved Africans for over a thousand years, running before, during, and after the Atlantic trade: trans-Saharan (c. 650–1900), Red Sea (to Arabia and the Gulf), and Indian Ocean / East African (Zanzibar, the Gulf, India).
I checked Austen against your own copy, and the standard citation needs correcting
You have Ralph A. Austen, “The Mediterranean Islamic Slave Trade out of Africa: A Tentative Census,” Slavery & Abolition 13:1 (1992) — , source note . Read for this note. Three things it says that change how you should use these numbers:
1. Austen refuses to give a grand total, on purpose. In his own words: “I have deliberately avoided drawing up grand totals for either the Egyptian-Sudan or the Maghrib-Sahara slave trades.” The round route-totals attributed to him come from his earlier 1979 trans-Saharan and 1988 East African censuses, not this paper.
2. This 1992 revision pushes the numbers DOWN. He states that his revised figures “will probably result in a lowering of the totals for the Mediterranean Islamic slave trade,” because the older totals were projected backward from the 19th century — the period with the highest calculated rate — and lowering that base lowers everything built on it. So citing “~7 million trans-Saharan, per Austen” is citing the figure its own author has since revised downward.
3. The methodological point is transferable and worth more than any number. Austen notes that most literary evidence gives “capacity estimates” — “statements about what could be expected under maximal conditions… rather than calculations of what occurred statistically over normally varying conditions.” That is the engine behind inflated figures in every direction, and it pairs with the census point in Conquest Without Europeans - Evidence Locker > Census-derived death tolls.
And Austen’s opening line is a gift — he names the polemic you are standing in
“Efforts to tabulate the number of slaves taken from Africa by Muslims have always been a subject of political polemics and academic controversy both because of their ideological implications (were Arabs ‘worse’ for Africa than Europeans?) and their methodological dimensions (how can one count the uncountable and what does one accomplish by such efforts anyway?).”
Quoting this shows you know the terrain is contested and that you’re not the first person to notice the question is loaded. It costs nothing and buys a great deal.
The rule that follows: argue the duration, the continuity, and the abolition date — all of which are solid — and stay off precise totals. “Three trades, thirteen centuries, still legal in Oman until 1970” cannot be attacked. “Seventeen million” can be, and the high-end polemical figures (Tidiane N’Diaye’s Le génocide voilé, the various “17–20 million” claims) should not be asserted as fact.
Two features worth knowing:
- The Zanj Rebellion, 869–883. A massive revolt of enslaved East Africans working the salt flats of southern Iraq, which took the Abbasid Caliphate fourteen years to suppress. The primary source is al-Tabari’s history. It is direct evidence of large-scale, plantation-style African slavery in the Islamic world in the 9th century — six hundred years before the Atlantic trade.
- Castration. Male captives destined for the Islamic world were frequently castrated, at very high mortality. This is one of the standard scholarly explanations for why there is no large Afro-descendant population in the Middle East and North Africa comparable to the Americas, despite comparable or greater numbers trafficked over a far longer period. It is a real argument in the literature (see Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East, 1990), and it is a demographic inference, not a headcount — present it as such.
On race: the claim that only Europeans racialized slavery does not survive contact with the Arabic sources. Lewis assembles medieval Arabic writing on the Zanj that is explicitly and contemptuously colour-coded. Cross → Arab Slave Trade · Slavery (Islam)
What you already own
📚 Sources for this note that are already in your library
Read and used above — (NAS) · (Zotero → )
In Zotero, not yet opened — the slave-trade cluster
— Matthew Hopper, “Slaves of One Master: Globalization and the African Diaspora in Arabia in the Age of Empire.” The best single item you own for the 19th-century Indian Ocean/Gulf trade and the date-and-pearl economies it fed · — David Gakunzi, “The Arab-Muslim Slave Trade” · — Toledano, The Ottoman Slave Trade and Its Suppression, 1840–1890; the — this is your source for who ended it and how hard it was to endFraming, use with care — “How Arab Colonialism Conquered the Middle East” (Medium, 2016 — a blog post; useful framing, not a citation) · (Wikipedia — ❌ do not cite, per your own standing rule)
The counter-case you should read against all of this — Attachment (file not included in this release), already in the vault. Rodney is the strongest version of “the African cases don’t matter because European capitalism restructured the whole continent.” Half your prep should go here.
Still to acquire — Perdue’s African equivalents don’t exist in your library yet: Lovejoy on Sokoto, Cobbing on the Mfecane, Conrad & Fisher on Ghana, Jalata on Oromia. See the checklist.
Also in the vault
1504 - Funj conquest of Nubia · 300AD - Aksumite conquest of Kush · 1076 - Almoravid conquest of Ghana Empire · 1400 (late) - Songhai conquest of Mali Empire · 1400-1500s - Songhai conflict with Mossi states · 1698-1730s - Oyo invasions of Dahomey · Almohad Caliphate · Abbasid Caliphate · Arab Colonization · Arab Slave Trade · Zanzibar Revolution — the 1964 sequel: the African majority overthrowing the Arab landowning elite, with the Zanzibari finance minister on record explaining Arab over-representation by the “mental abilities of blacks” · Sudan, Wars & Genocide · The First and Second Sudanese Civil Wars · Darfur · 19th Century- European powers to Africa (for the contrast) · African wars (the 21st-century continuation) · Continents by Death Toll