To understand human behavior, economics often depends on history, and history is sometimes a product of archaeology. In the case of Africa, if there are no consistent economic interpretations of new archaeological discoveries to update our knowledge of the past, our mere theorizing will not do justice to the true economic foundations of the continent and its people.

For instance, before the excavations in 19th century Egypt, historians believed that the economy of ancient Egypt revolved around the cultivation of cereals like wheat and barley, and their rationing among citizens. This led many economic historians to believe that the ancient Egyptian society was most likely communist. However, excavations in the last few decades disprove this and we know that rationing of yields only happened among workers on public projects. This was partly because the ancient Egyptians struggled to store water to support farming through the dry seasons and yields were often low, 2 not because their society was based on common farming or some sort of sharing according to need. Citizens always kept their harvest and government officials only took surpluses—when there were any—to share among public workers as a form of payment. If facts had not been updated, we would still interpret this aspect of Egyptian history wrongly.

Prior to the millennium, economic historians only went as far as writing on the economy of medieval Africa telling the remarkable stories of mighty kingdoms of Great Zimbabwe, Timbuktu, Ghana and others—most of which gained prominence from their large open markets and commercial exploits. Only a few went earlier than that as the scarcity of evidence limited the scope of their analyses. However, with new interests in Africa’s past and the many successful excavations since the early 1990s, 3 we now know more about early African civilizations–enough to allow for a scientific study of their economic lives. Perhaps the exhausting requirement for an interdisciplinary approach to understand Africa’s economic history is the reason why there has not been sufficient economic interpretation of archaeological discoveries. So, how did these early Africans organize commerce? And do we have sufficient evidence to categorize their economic processes?

All the early African civilizations considered in this series had complex economies, and there is sufficient evidence to conclude that their economic cultures were largely based on market trading in a market economy. Also, contrary to misconceptions that Africa has always had a backward role in the international trading system, these early African civilizations shaped global trade. They stood at the same level in terms of economic strength as the ancient Greeks and the ancient Romans. 4 The ancient Egyptians, the Kushite kingdoms, and the Aksumites defined commerce and pioneered some of the enduring inventions in banking. But to justify the use of the term ‘market trading’ in qualifying their process of exchange, and why we might even call them market economies, we must first understand both terms in their historic contexts.

In his monumental work, Trade And Market In The Early Empires , Austro‐​Hungarian economic historian, Karl Polanyi, suggested that there were three main types of trade in the ancient world: gift trade, administered trade, and market trade. To Polanyi, market trading was central to almost all prosperous civilizations in the ancient world—including the early African civilizations. And he roughly explained how to identify one when he noted: