ABSTRACT
Niumi was considerably more than a petty district commanded by warlords. By the time of the state's thorough involvement in the Atlantic economic complex, Niumi had developed an efficient, systematic, manageable, and adaptable political apparatus. The expansion of the Atlantic economic complex in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was part of a larger phenomenon associated with a pulling together of European wealth and its investment in worldwide commercial ventures. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a time of steady Luso-African rise among Niumi's commercial elite, followed by a relatively rapid decline. Niumi's Luso-African population declined after the middle of the eighteenth century. While Niumi's Luso-African population was declining, Muslims in the state were holding their own. Learned Muslims in Niumi in the eighteenth century may not have been making the pilgrimage to Mecca, but they were involved in traveling widely to attend Islamic schools.
