700–1500 CE: (The Muslim-Dominated Era Deepening Africa’s Global Salience — The Later Global Linkages of the Seventh to the Fourteenth Centuries CE When Musl…

700–1500 CE: (The Muslim-Dominated Era Deepening Africa’s Global Salience — The Later Global Linkages of the Seventh to the Fourteenth Centuries CE When Muslim-Ruled Lands Dominated the Geographically Central Portions of the African-Eurasian Macrocontinent If Anything Deepening and Widening the Global Salience of Africa to World History, All Manner of Items of Lasting Global Significance Spreading Along These Connections from Silk to Gold to Gunpowder to the Writings of Aristotle to Religion to Pandemics, the Rise of European Sea Trade in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries Taking Advantage of These Myriad Existing Connections and from 1492 Bringing the Americas and the Pacific into These Networks Making Them Fully Global While Shifting the Focal Crossroads of World Commerce from the Middle East to Atlantic Europe): The later global linkages of the seventh to the fourteenth centuries CE — when Muslim-ruled lands dominated the geographically central portions of the African-Eurasian macrocontinent — if anything deepened and widened the global salience of Africa to world history. All manner of items of lasting global significance spread along these connections: silk, gold, gunpowder, the writings of Aristotle, religion, pandemics. The rise of European sea trade in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries took advantage of these myriad existing connections and, from 1492 onward, by bringing the Americas and the Pacific into these networks, made those connections and their consequences for the spread of ideas, things, people, and disease fully global — and incidentally, over time, shifted the focal crossroads of world commerce more and more from the Middle East to Atlantic Europe. The shift of commercial gravity from the Middle East to Atlantic Europe is, in Ehret’s framing, an incidental consequence — not the central event that the Western narrative makes it. For three millennia, the crossroads of world commerce lay in the Middle East and the Indian Ocean, with Africa at the southern anchor. The European maritime expansion of the fifteenth century did not create global commerce. It redirected it — capturing the revenues of existing networks by finding sea routes around the African and Asian intermediaries who had controlled them for millennia, and then extending those networks to the Americas and the Pacific. The European “Age of Discovery” was, in material terms, an act of commercial piracy on a civilizational scale — the seizure of trade routes that others had built and maintained for thousands of years. And the shift of the crossroads to Atlantic Europe was not a mark of European civilizational superiority. It was a geographical accident enabled by the compass, the caravel, and the cannon — technologies that Europe had borrowed, respectively, from China, the Islamic world, and China again.