Atlantic Caravels and Trans-Saharan Caravans: Revisiting an Old Debate

Among Boubakar Barry’s most influential contributions is the so-called caravan versus caravel thesis, first laid out in his Le royaume du Waalo: Le Sénégal avant la conquête (1972). From the second-half of fifteenth century, he contended, caravan trade competed with maritime traffic for the transportation of goods and enslaved people across the Sahara amongst West and North African markets. Accordingly, European ships, starting with the Portuguese and their caravels, would have taken a sizeable market-share of Western Africa’s continental, primarily trans-Saharan exchange. The rise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade would “gradually supplant trans-Saharan commerce with the victory of the caravel over the caravan.” Barry’s thesis has been consequential in shaping subsequent research questions and interpretations, from explaining the cause of the Moroccan invasion of West Africa’s Songhay Empire, to the precipitation of many mainland economies into decline, and the incitement of religious war, such as the seventeenth-century jihad of Nāṣir al-Dīn. Although subsequent research would establish that trans-Saharan trade actually continued to flow, with significant ebbs as late as the nineteenth century, it is worth revisiting this old debate for the earlier periods.This paper examines the caravel-caravan thesis through the lens of a singular trade item, gold. In so doing, I place in conversation with works by Barry, W. Rodney, V. M. Godinho, A. G. Hopkins, S. Amin and others. Based on a review of the literature, a handful of primary sources, and a macro-approach to commercial history, the paper sketches the biography of West African gold from the fifteenth to the sixteenth centuries, gaging its respective weight in exports by land and sea.