2000–1000 BCE: (The Inland Delta of the Niger — A Second Seminal Region of the West African Commercial Revolution, Encompassing a Range of Highly Contrasting…

2000–1000 BCE: (The Inland Delta of the Niger — A Second Seminal Region of the West African Commercial Revolution, Encompassing a Range of Highly Contrasting Environments That Generated Specialized Communities of Fishing Specialists Along the Bayous, African Rice Cultivators in the Dry Land Areas Among the Niger’s Channels, and Dry Farmers of Pearl Millet and Fonio for Hundreds of Kilometers Around the Delta): A second seminal region in the West African commercial revolution in the second millennium BCE comprised the areas both in and surrounding the inland delta of the Niger. The delta region encompassed a range of highly contrasting environments for subsistence production, and it was precisely this ecological diversity that generated the conditions for specialized production and exchange. Right along its bayous lived communities of fishing specialists. In the dry land areas among the channels of the Niger there resided a different set of communities — specialists in the cultivation of African rice. And for hundreds of kilometers all around the delta there lived communities engaged in dry farming of a variety of African grains other than rice: pearl millet and fonio, along with other crops. Here was the ecological engine of commercial complexity: communities that could not produce everything they needed in their own microenvironment but could produce surpluses of particular goods that neighboring communities in different microenvironments needed. Fish for grain, rice for millet, specialized products for generalized ones — the inland delta was a natural incubator of exchange, and the exchange generated the social infrastructure of trade: routes, relationships, middlemen, markets. This was not commerce imposed from above by a state. This was commerce emerging from below, from the material logic of ecological complementarity, and it predated any state structure in the region by centuries if not millennia.