2000 BCE–300 CE: (Different Pathways to Commercial Complexity — The Middle East and Egypt Developing States and Social Inequality Long Before Merchant-Based …

2000 BCE–300 CE: (Different Pathways to Commercial Complexity — The Middle East and Egypt Developing States and Social Inequality Long Before Merchant-Based Trade Emerged in the First Millennium BCE, While West Africa Followed a Reversed Sequence Beginning Its Shift to Towns and Merchant-Artisan Classes as Early as the Second Millennium BCE with Powerful Empires Like Wagadu Arising Only Subsequently in the Early First Millennium CE to Control Already Existing Commercial Relations): What is also apparent from these histories is that different social and political trajectories have lain behind the rise of commercial networks in different regions. In the Middle East and Egypt, small-scale worlds gave rise to a world of states and socially unequal societies long before the growing shift in the first millennium BCE toward merchant-based kinds of trade. The peoples of the western and central Sudan belt of Africa, on the other hand, followed a different historical pathway, beginning their shift as early as the second millennium BCE to a cultural world that included towns and new social classes of merchants and artisans. There the driving new factor was the emergence of specialized manufacturing and the exchange of manufactured goods for both the manufactures and raw materials of other, more distant areas. Only subsequently, in the early first millennium CE, did powerful empires such as Wagadu begin to arise in West Africa, building their power and wealth on controlling and protecting the already existing commercial relations. The sequence is reversed. In the Middle East, states came first and commerce followed. In West Africa, commerce came first and states followed. This is not a minor variation. It is a fundamentally different pathway to social complexity, and it demolishes the assumption that there is only one route from small-scale society to urbanism, commerce, and political centralization. The West African pathway — commerce generating towns, towns generating artisan classes, artisan classes generating wealth, and wealth eventually attracting state power — is an alternative model of civilizational development, and its existence forces a rethinking of every unilinear theory of social evolution that the Western academy has ever produced.