100–300 CE: (Trans-Saharan Gold Trade: By No Later Than the First Three Centuries CE Traders Along the Trans-Saharan Routes Carrying a Major New Product, Gol…

100–300 CE: (Trans-Saharan Gold Trade: By No Later Than the First Three Centuries CE Traders Along the Trans-Saharan Routes Carrying a Major New Product, Gold from the Mines and Alluvial Deposits of West Africa, Across the Sahara to North Africa, Further Enhancing the Consequential Place of Africa in World Economic History, the Creation of the First Currencies Being an Additional Major Consequence of the New Kind of Trade Relations with Historical Significance Down to the Present): By no later than the first three centuries CE, traders along the trans-Saharan routes were carrying a major new product: gold, drawn from the mines and alluvial deposits of West Africa, across the Sahara to North Africa. This trade further enhanced the consequential place of Africa in world economic history. An additional major consequence of the new kind of trade relations, with historical significance extending down to the present, was the eventual creation in each region of the first currencies. West African gold would become, in subsequent centuries, the lubricant of the Mediterranean and later the European monetary system, the metal that backed the dinars of the Islamic world and the florins of Renaissance Italy. The trans-Saharan gold trade enriched the merchants who carried it and the kingdoms that controlled the mines. It also restructured the monetary foundations of civilizations that never saw the miners who dug it from the earth or the alluvial workers who sifted it from West African riverbeds. The wealth of medieval Europe was built, in no small part, on African gold, extracted by African labor, transported by African and Saharan intermediaries, and channeled into Mediterranean commerce through networks that had been functioning since the first centuries of the common era. And the creation of currencies (standardized media of exchange that abstracted value from the physical commodities being traded) was itself a consequence of the scale and complexity that long-distance trade had attained. Money is a convergent response to a universal problem. Africa’s commercial networks generated that response as independently and as consequentially as any in the ancient world.