In 1252/1836, during his three-month sojourn in the Wād Nūn town of Guelmīm, John Davidson, the British traveler, wrote diary entries that repeatedly announced the impending arrival of the large caravan or akābār returning from Timbuktu. He conveys the suspense lingering in the air as the people awaited with great anticipation the inbound camel train. But that year, the caravan never made it to port, or at least not in one piece, as it was raided by Saharan brigands who pillaged most of its loads before it reached the sūq, or market, of Guelmīm. A recent outbreak of smallpox also had kept people from going to market, and so that year the annual fair of Sīdī al-Ghāzī was a fiasco, much to the annoyance of Shaykh Bayrūk, the Tikna chief of Guelmīm.

In the nineteenth century, Guelmīm was the largest town in the region. It was a crossroads of Saharan and Atlantic exchange, operating as a terminus for caravan traffic coming from various Saharan oases and the southern desert-edge markets of western Africa.

Caravans were the lifelines of Saharan oasis towns. Their departures marked the yearly calendar as did their most anticipated returns.

In the late nineteenth century a trader from Tīshīt entrusted merchandise, by way of an agency contract, to a caravaner traveling to the commercial center of Guelmīm in the Wād Nūn region. When he finally returned to Tīshīt after an absence of four years, the caravaner denied having been entrusted with some of the goods, and he declared that the qāḍī (judge) of Guelmīm had taken possession of one portion. As for the rest of the merchandise, he claimed that it got “lost along the way” (ḍāʿa fī al-ṭarīq). The original owner of the merchandise asked the qāḍī of Tīshīt to mediate the dispute, but he found no proof that the caravaner had lied to, or otherwise cheated, him. So he called on the services of a muftī (jurist), Muḥammad b. Ibraāhīm of the Awlād Bū al-Sibāʿ clan, who probably himself was from Wād Nūn, for the issuance of a fatwa.

In an effort to recover the capital she had invested in a caravan venture, al-Ḥuriyya hired her brother Sāliḥ as her trade representative (wakīl). The year was 1292/1875, as per the contract she drew up with him, which was a time of relative peace and prosperity in the western Sahara, according to the local chronicles. While this agency contract does not state where al-Ḥuriyya was located, nor where her brother was to travel to collect her due, she was a Tikna woman who probably resided in either Shinqīṭi or Guelmīm from where she engaged in trans-Saharan trade with markets further south via proxy. Sāliḥ was to collect a debt owed to her that amounted to 142 gold mithqāls (or about 600 grams of gold), as well as an unspecified quantity of silver, some cloth, and her camels.

Understanding how the challenging feat was realized of conducting trans-Saharan caravan trade across perilously arid lands not ruled by a unifying state or regulated by a common currency is the principal aim of this book. By focusing on the institutional mechanisms that facilitated long-distance trade, namely, the place of the law, religion, and literacy, on the one hand, and trade network organizing, on the other, I hope to have come closer to this goal. The nineteenth century witnessed an increased volume of caravan traffic now more directly interconnected with European maritime trade. The proliferation of firearms and the increased availability of writing paper in this period were two factors that had a significant impact on the organization of camelback commerce. But aside from these developments, one question remains largely unanswered, namely, how commercial and legal institutions and practices may have been transformed in the course of time.

On the eve of the colonial period where this study ends, dramatic changes in the lives of long-distance traders were about to unfold. Before the end of the nineteenth century, some Wād Nūn merchants were forgoing the arduous Saharan crossings by embarking on European ships to transport goods, including horses, from Al-Ṣawīra to Ndar and back.