Age of Exploration and Integration of the Niumi into the Worldwide (Economic) System

History Essay
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Donald Wright's four-part book focuses on the people of the Mandinka kingdom of Niumi, which is located near at the mouth of the River of Gambia in West Africa, and how world-historical processes were undermined from the perspectives of the ordinary people themselves, instead of pointing out how globalization affected small societies. The author looked at world-historical processes from the inside-out periphery and offered a synthesis of global vision. The author discussed the broad historical issues and developments in the book, divided into four parts with two chapters each, with topics from the Age of Exploration to the integration of the Niumi into the worldwide (economic) system.
According to Wright, Niumi’s introduction to worldwide systems was catalyzed by the onset of Islam and trans-Saharan trading (through which Mandinka political influence is significant). This integration was furthered when the Portuguese stepped in during the Age of Exploration; from Trans-Sahara, Niumi was integrated into the Atlantic trading system. He portrayed Niumi as an active force on the global stage. He shows five centuries witnessed how global forces had converged in Niumi and troubled life of its people, and how this small Mandinka kingdom has evolved and declines from a position of relative strength in the fifteenth century to a position of weakness and relative obscurity from the late 1800s onwards. In a sense then, Wright’s book is situated at the intersection of African and world-systems historiography (Ngalamulume, 2009; Mark, 1998).
The author draws heavily from Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems model which talked about a global economy with the western industrialized nations at its core, and other parts of the world including Africa, as its periphery hence, the relation is that of inequality and dependence. The core is dependent on the raw materials and resources from the periphery, but the periphery is more reliant on the core by its consumption of finished products from the core and due to its lack of industrial or technological muscle.
Throughout the historical narrative, Wright pointed out that Niumi and its people had been having connection to its contacts and connections with old and distant parts of the world from time immemorial, moving and evolving from having autonomy and relative strength, to positions of weakness and dependency, particularly from the mid-nineteenth century onwards with the decline and end of the Atlantic slave trade and the era of colonialism in West Africa. Cash crop economies and the growth of urban commercial centers brought several changes in the divisions of labor; young males were taken from the farms, leaving the staple food production to women and the elderly, leading to drops in the quantities of available cash crops for export thus, weakening the economic bases of societies. Patterns of severe rains didn’t help, and the continuing migration from the rural to urban have contributed to the fall and weakening of the Niumi and bringing poverty to its constituents. Then came the British, subduing the West African kingdom which Wright argues had dealt a blow in the alread...