ABSTRACT
People living in Niumi, on the north bank of West Africa’s Gambia River, have been involved in the exchange of goods and ideas with people some distance away for as long as there is any record. From the eighth century A.D., if not earlier, West Africa was connected to the commercial complex of the central part of the Old World through the trans-Saharan trade, and Niumi was part of a commercial network of considerable scope and sophistication that was tied to that exchange. The increasing importance of West African gold and slaves to the Mediterranean and the expanding Eurasian trade in the thirteenth century affected West African history in general and Niumi in particular. By the fifteenth century it is likely that residents of the small coastal and riverine kingdom were as eager as Europeans to find access to greater and more direct participation in the expanding market of the world system.
