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Based on a broad assessment of the scholarship on North-Western Africa, this article examines Saharan historiography with a particular view towards understanding how and why historians have long represented the continent as being composed of two ‘Africas’. Starting with the earliest Arabic writings, and, much later, French colonial renderings, it traces the epistemological creation of a racial and geographic divide. Then, the article considers the field of African studies in North African universities and ends with a review of recent multidisciplinary research that embraces a trans-Saharan approach. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: This article contributes to the literature on Islamic institutional history by examining how the discounting of documents in Islamic legal practice constrained the organization of early modern Muslim trade. It is argued that the reliance on literacy, on the one hand, and an Islamic legal framework, on the other, gave early modern Muslim traders a comparative advantage in economic organization, but the lack of faith in paper as documentary evidence in Islamic law posed fundamental constraints to the development of Muslim economies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article focuses on the legal culture and slave ownership contests in the nineteenth-century Sahara. Litigation between Muslims was common then in the Saharan oases of today's Mauritania. Based on formal Islamic legal references, local jurisprudence and prevailing cultural customs, judges and jurists functioned as legal-service providers. While crime was adjudicated by clan leaders, and town councils oversaw the affairs of the community, Muslim legal-service providers were called upon to issue rulings on civil cases. The practice of slavery among Muslims was said to be more humane as it was recognized in sources of Islamic law and associated with a popular Islamic saying. Muslim jurists addressing the legal concerns of the day regularly discussed slavery cases.

For ages, the Sahara has been portrayed as an ‘empty-quarter’ where only nomads on their spiteful camels dare to tread. Colonial ethnographic templates reinforced perceptions about the Sahara as a ‘natural’ boundary between the North and the rest of Africa, separating ‘White’ and ‘Black’ Africa and, by extension, ‘Arabs’ and ‘Berbers’ from ‘Africans’. Consequently, very few scholars have ventured into the Sahara despite the overwhelming historical evidence pointing to the interactions, interdependencies and shared histories of neighbouring African countries. By transcending the artificial ‘Saharan frontier’, it is easy to see that the Sahara has always been a hybrid space of cross-cultural interactions marked by continuous flows of peoples, ideas and goods. This paper discusses a methodological approach for writing Saharan history which seeks to transcend this artificial divide and is necessarily transnational. As a scholar of nineteenth and early twentieth century trans-Saharan history, I retrace the steps of trading families across several generations and markets. This research itinerary crisscrossed Saharan regions of Western Africa from Senegal, the Gambia and Mali, to the Islamic Republic of Mauritania and the Kingdom of Morocco, with stops in archival repositories in France. With specific reference to the art of writing African history, I discuss how my own path into the African past was shaped by ad hoc encounters with peoples, their memories and texts. But if the facts, perspectives and narratives that form the evidence I rely upon to reconstruct trans-Saharan history were collected on an accidental trajectory, the interpretation of this data followed a deliberate methodological approach. I explain how orality permeated the process of my historical investigation and I argue for a recognition of the centrality of orality in the creation and interpretation of all forms of historical evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]