2000–1000 BCE: (A New Kind of Town — The Commercial Town as Distinct from the Temple Center or Royal Capital, Towns Serving Primarily as Production Centers o…

2000–1000 BCE: (A New Kind of Town — The Commercial Town as Distinct from the Temple Center or Royal Capital, Towns Serving Primarily as Production Centers of Goods Destined for Commerce or as Trading Centers at the Crossroads of Trade Routes, a Form of Urbanism Not Generally Recognized Outside the African Sphere and Too Often Not Even by Historians of Africa): Along with the commercial revolution came a new kind of town. Previously, towns where they existed — in Egypt, the Levant, Mesopotamia — were principally temple centers or governing centers of kingdoms. The new kind of town served instead primarily as a production center of goods destined for commerce or as a trading center located at the crossroads of trade routes from one region to another, or as both. This is a distinction with enormous implications for how we understand the origins of urbanism. The conventional narrative treats cities as creations of state power — emanations of royal authority or religious centralization. What West Africa produced was something different: towns generated by commerce itself, by the logic of production and exchange rather than the logic of command. And what is generally not recognized outside of the African sphere — and only too often not even by historians of Africa — is the importance of this separate commercial revolution that was under way in the western and central Sudan belt during the second and first millennia BCE. It began independently of the developments of the Mediterranean region, and this separate African commercial revolution — this shift to organized long-distance trade carried on by professional traders — appears in fact to have begun even earlier in time than its Mediterranean counterpart. Four centers of production of goods for trade emerged in the western and central Sudan belt by no later than the early and middle second millennium BCE, and it was the linking up of these production regions in the second half of that millennium that progressively brought the West African commercial revolution into existence.