ABSTRACT
Agricultural history suggests that the land in the Central African Republic was covered until the last millennium b.c. with a thick, dry forest that gave way to savanna only as agriculturalists slowly and laboriously cleared the land for millets and sorghums. Written historical knowledge about Central African Republic begins to emerge from only the sixteenth century. The global economy that had begun to take shape in the fifteenth century as the new capitalist commercial system of Northwest Europe began expanding around the world did not directly penetrate Central Africa until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the nineteenth century Muslim slave raiding and trading and commerce in ivory and firearms coming from the north were the major influences on the history of the region. In 1910 Ubangi-Shari joined the two French colonies, Gabon and Moyen-Congo and Chad to form the federation of French Equatorial Africa.
