出版社：American Sociological Association Section on Political Economy of the World System
摘要：Th e purpose of the present paper is to inves-tigate Timbuktu's economic decline in the three centuries elapsed between 1526, when Leo Africanus reached the Mysterious City, and 1830, when the fi rst European explorers arrived in Timbu ktu. It is ar gued that Timbu ktu 's decline was neither an accident nor the result of inevitable natural conditions. Timbuktu's decay was the product of historical and social forces. Specifi cally, it is argued that Timbuktu lost power and prestige because its market decayed. However, it is also suggested that no single factor can account individually for this event. Th e crisis of Timbuktu's market was provoked by the interaction of two factors: fi rst, the gen-eral decline of Mediterranean trade resulting from the emergence of the new Trans-Oceanic trade, and the crisis of the system's component parts at the individual level, and their inability to function as a system; and second, the insti-tutional decay which followed the fall of the Songhai empire, which made Trans-Saharan trade particularly risky and, henceforth, eco-nomically ine. cient. Building on this, the paper ends on a methodological note as it underlines the theoretical inability of monocausal expla-nations to capture the inherent complexity of social phenomena
