Year: 2025-2026
Research Team Type: Faculty-led
Team leads: Bruce Hall, Associate Professor, Department of History; Adam Benkato, Associate Professor, Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures (MELC)
As imported European paper became cheaper and more easily obtainable in the Sahara Desert and its hinterlands in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the practice of letter-writing grew enormously. As in other parts of the world, letter-writing made it possible for distance to be bridged in new ways, drawing far-flung people into circuits of information exchange. This project seeks to explore how letter-writing in this period contributed to broader economic historical changes in commercial practices associated with trans-Saharan trade, availability of credit, recoverability of debt and inheritances. Writing in Arabic also accelerated processes of Arabization of Berber- and sub-Saharan language-speaking communities in the region and as such, letters are a key index of new forms of literacy among non-elite people and broader language change.
There are thousands of extant Arabic letters across the circum-Saharan region, almost all of them produced since the second half of the eighteenth century. Some are held in public archives but many more remain in private family collections. Very few have been published. This project aims to develop digital and database tools to create better datasets from the contents of the letters so that they can be used in social scientific research. The team will focus on one set of letters sent to/from the ancient northern Saharan town of Ghadames, in modern-day Libya. A significant oasis town since Roman times, communities of merchants from Ghadames wrote letters to/from important trading towns such as Tripoli, Tunis, Kano, and Timbuktu, from when letters can be found today.