Michael A. Gomez, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa. Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017, viii, 505 pp., 8 maps.

To do justice to history in the global context would require to pursue global history, which is not just a chiasmic play on words. No major country, no people, no great civilization, and no significant culture has really existed in total isolation, with just a few exceptions. But most scholars are simply not able to cover everything, and it would <?page nr="271"?>be hubris even to aim for that goal. Traditionally, medievalists have mostly focused on western, central, southern, and somewhat also northern Europe, for instance, but then this comes to a limit very quickly since linguistic barriers and also difficulties gaining access to the relevant sources and archives make this all very difficult. Recent years have also seen efforts to open the perspective toward the Arabic, Indian, and Asian world, whereas the American cultures remain mostly ignored in the medieval context. The opposite side probably faces the same difficulties, since Chinese or Japanese medievalists have to cope with a very long and expansive history as well, or the Indian or Indonesian historians, for example, which leaves no room or time to explore the connections, if there have ever been any, to other cultures.