Gum arabic is a type of resin that is exuded by Acacia senegal<\/em> trees when the harmattan<\/em> \u2013 a hot and dry wind \u2013 blows through the Sahara between March and May. In the 17th and 18th centuries, nomadic Arabo-Berber herders called zawaya<\/em> regularly traveled to the Senegambian and Mauritanian hinterland, and had their enslaved workers scrape the gum balls from the trees. This was hard work in the middle of the desert, and potentially harmful because the trees are quite thorny. One enslaved person would harvest approximately half a ton of gum during one season. Once the harvest was over, the zawaya<\/em> formed caravans and had the enslaved transport the gum to the Atlantic coast. Their preferred destination was Portendick, in what is today western Mauritania. There, but also in other locations on the coast, they sold the gum to European traders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fig. 1: Gum exuding from an acacia nilotica tree (photo: A. Baindur, 2016, Source: https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Gum_Arabic_exuding.jpg#file<\/a>, CC BY-SA 4.0<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fig. 2: Gum Arabic balls (photo: T. A. Eltom, 2011, Source: https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Gum_Arabic.jpg<\/a>, CC BY 3.0<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because of its importance for European textile industries, the French, English, Dutch, and Prussians waged war with each other on the coast for decades. These wars also included local African polities that allied with various European actors to pursue their own interests. European artisans needed gum arabic especially for textile printing, but also as a thickener for dyes. The rise of gum imports from the late seventeenth century onward coincided with the rise of indigo imports from the Caribbean. Today, gum arabic is still widely used for example for glues or watercolors, but also in the food industry as a stabilizer and thickener (check out the ingredients of your vegan gummy bears for example). It is currently one of the most important exports of the Sudan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dalen, Dorrit van, 2019. Gum Arabic: The Golden Tears of the Acacia Tree. <\/em>Leiden University Press.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Delcourt, Andr\u00e9, 1952. La France et les \u00e9tablissements fran\u00e7ais au S\u00e9negal entre 1713 et 1763: La Compagnie des Indes et le S\u00e9negal. La guerre de la gomme<\/em>. Cahors: Memoires de l\u2019Institut Fran\u00e7ais d\u2019Afrique Noire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Webb, James L. A., 1985. \u201cThe Trade in Gum Arabic: Prelude to French Conquest in Senegal.\u201d Journal of African History<\/em> 26 (2\/3): 149\u201368.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Webb, James L. A., 1995. Desert Frontier: Ecological and Economic Change Along the Western Sahel, 1600\u20131850<\/em>.Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press. Wimmler, Jutta, 2019. \u201cFrom Senegal to Augsburg: Gum Arabic and the Central European Textile Industry in the Eighteenth Century.\u201d Textile History<\/em> 50 (1): 4\u201322.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Jutta WimmlerBCDSS Research Group Leader The resin gum arabic was an extremely important and yet rather invisible raw material for early modern European textile industries. It functioned as a thickener for dyes and was prominently used in textile printing. It was extracted by enslaved laborers in the Senegambian and Mauritanian hinterland in the seventeenth and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":442,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"themenfeld":[43,46],"class_list":["post-478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized-en","themenfeld-strong-asymmetrical-dependencies","themenfeld-global-colour-gradients"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fabrics-of-dependency.uni-bonn.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fabrics-of-dependency.uni-bonn.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fabrics-of-dependency.uni-bonn.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fabrics-of-dependency.uni-bonn.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fabrics-of-dependency.uni-bonn.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=478"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/fabrics-of-dependency.uni-bonn.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2801,"href":"https:\/\/fabrics-of-dependency.uni-bonn.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478\/revisions\/2801"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fabrics-of-dependency.uni-bonn.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fabrics-of-dependency.uni-bonn.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fabrics-of-dependency.uni-bonn.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fabrics-of-dependency.uni-bonn.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=478"},{"taxonomy":"themenfeld","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fabrics-of-dependency.uni-bonn.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/themenfeld?post=478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/fabrics-of-dependency.uni-bonn.de\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/WIMMLER-3_Fig.-1_Gum_Arabic_exuding-2.jpeg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/fabrics-of-dependency.uni-bonn.de\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/WIMMLER-3_Fig.-2_Gum_Arabic-1.jpeg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nFurther Reading<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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