West Africa: Did you mean...?

West Africa was one of the world's greatest producers of gold in the Middle Ages. Trade in the metal went back to antiquity but when the camel caravans of the Sahara linked North Africa to the savannah interior, the trade really took off...

At its fullest extent, the Roman Empire stretched from around modern-day Aswan, Egypt at its southernmost point to Great Britain in the north but the influence of the Roman Empire went far beyond even the borders of its provinces as a result...

Salt from the Sahara desert was one of the major trade goods of ancient West Africa where very little naturally occurring deposits of the mineral could be found. Transported via camel caravans and by boat along such rivers as the Niger and...

German East Africa (Deutsch-Ostafrika) was a colony of Imperial Germany from 1885 until 1918. The territory, much larger than Germany itself, covered what is today Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, and part of Mozambique. As in many other European...

The ancient and medieval Mediterranean might have been a bustling stage of ever-changing empires but, across the inhospitable barrier of the Sahara Desert, West Africans were equally busy building up and toppling down their own kingdoms and...

The Mediterranean Sea was the economic focal point of the Roman Empire. Rome's armies first established an empire across these waters beginning back in the times of the Roman Republic. In 200 CE, the Mediterranean was still the channel that...

The Berlin Conference, also known as the Berlin West Africa Conference, was held between November 1884 and February 1885. Imperial powers, notably Great Britain, France, Belgium, and Germany, met to thrash out their competing claims for control...

The Description of Africa is the first comprehensive book about Africa, written by Leo Africanus, an African scholar trained in the Islamic intellectual tradition, in 1526, during the Italian Renaissance. A skillful mixture of anthropology...

Following the conquest of North Africa by Muslim Arabs in the 7th century CE, Islam spread throughout West Africa via merchants, traders, scholars, and missionaries, that is largely through peaceful means whereby African rulers either tolerated...

The Kingdom of West Francia (843-987 CE, also known as The Kingdom of the West Franks) was the region of Western Europe that formed the western part of the Carolingian Empire of Charlemagne (Holy Roman Emperor 800-814 CE) known as Francia...