300–1 BCE: (Carbon Steel Two Thousand Years Before the Bessemer Process, African Iron Smelters in the Great Lakes Region Constructing Furnaces Capable of Pro…

300–1 BCE: (Carbon Steel Two Thousand Years Before the Bessemer Process, African Iron Smelters in the Great Lakes Region Constructing Furnaces Capable of Producing Carbon Steel Directly from the Smelt by the End of the First Millennium BCE, Europeans Not Achieving Single-Step Steel Production Until the Nineteenth Century, the Chinese Developing It by the Eleventh Century CE but Still Centuries After Africans, and African Iron Remaining Superior in Quality to Unforged European Iron Well into the Era of the Atlantic Trade): And then there is still another remarkable African first in iron technology. As the investigations by the archaeologist Peter Schmidt have revealed, by the end of the first millennium BCE, African iron smelters living in the Great Lakes region began to construct furnaces capable of generating sufficiently high temperatures to produce carbon steel directly from the smelt. This is no small matter. Europeans did not learn to produce steel by a single step until the invention, two thousand years later in the nineteenth century, of the Bessemer process. The Chinese were also ahead of the West in this respect, having developed capacities for directly producing steel by the eleventh century CE. But even their advance took place centuries after African smelters had already attained this capability. Iron produced in many parts of Africa for a long time remained superior in quality to unforged, raw iron from Europe. West Africans were well aware of the excellence of their iron, as we see in their responses to European iron arriving in the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries. Not only did Africans prefer the product of their own smelters and smiths in actual toolmaking, but the Portuguese, who dominated the coastal trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, bought higher-quality iron from African producers in today’s Sierra Leone and Liberia and transported it around the coast to Guinea and Senegal to exchange for other products, notably gold, leather, and, beyond regrettably, human beings. Let that irony settle. The Europeans who came to Africa claiming technological superiority were buying African iron because it was better than their own.