West Africa Seen from Moroccan Manuscript Archives

Abstract The Area Studies paradigm that emerged in the United States in the late 1950s surely fostered research on parts of the world that had traditionally been neglected in academia, such as the African continent. However, this paradigm also had its shortcomings. Among these shortcomings, there is the tendency to disconnect North Africa from the rest of the continent. Recent works on trans-Saharan connections are a testimony of the potential of studying African history across the Sahara and from a continental perspective. This article demonstrates this potential by presenting a large corpus of Arabic manuscripts concerning West African history held in two of the most important libraries of Morocco: The Bibliothèque Royale Hasaniyya / al-Khizāna al-Ḥasaniyya and the Bibliothèque Nationale du Royaume du Maroc / al-Maktaba al-Waṭāniyya li-l-Mamlakat al-Maghribiyya.