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Pick up almost any book on early and medieval world history and empire, and where do you find West Africa? On the periphery. This pioneering book, the first on this period of the region´s history in a generation, tells a different story. Interweaving political and social history and drawing on a rich array of sources, including Arabic manuscripts, oral histories, and recent archaeological findings, Michael Gomez unveils a new vision of how categories of ethnicity, race, gender, and caste emerged in Africa and in global history more generally. Scholars have long held that such distinctions arose during the colonial period, but Gomez shows they developed much earlier. Telling a radically new story about early Africa in global history, African Dominion is set to be the standard work on the subject for many years to come.

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"A masterful account of early West African history, this authoritative book fills a major gap. It will long remain one of the most important works on - and be essential to debates about - precolonial West Africa."--Andreas Eckert, Humboldt University of Berlin

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Michael A. Gomez is the Silver Professor of History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. His books include Black Crescent: African Muslims in the Americas; Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South; Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora; and Pragmatism in the Age of Jihad: The Precolonial State of Bundu

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