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Timeline:
2nd century AD-1789: Old World to New

 2nd-3rd century AD
Aksum becomes the greatest market of northeastern Africa.
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 c. 600
The first of the great medieval western African trading empires is established as Wadagu, or Ghana. Its people act as intermediaries between the Arab and Berber salt traders to the north and the producers of gold and ivory to the south.
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 c. 1100
The Great Zimbabwe (in what would later be southeastern Zimbabwe) begins some 400 years as the heart of a great trading empire.
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 1230
Sundiata, a West African monarch, establishes the western Sudanese empire of Mali, which flourishes for two centuries and lasts for three.
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 1307
Mansa Musa takes the throne of the great Mali empire.
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 mid-14th century
A loose alliance, consisting of seven African states (Biram, Daura, Gobir, Kano, Katsina, Rano, and Zaria [Zazzau]), is formed. Known as the Hausa states, they flourished until the 19th century, when they were conquered by the Fulani.
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1441
The first African slaves are transported to Portugal.
 
 
 1464
Sonni 'Ali ascends the throne of the Songhai kingdom. By his death in 1492, the Songhai control a vast trading empire that lasts until the end of the 16th century.
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 c. 1517
Black plantation slavery begins in the New World when Spaniards begin importing slaves from Africa to replace Native Americans who died from harsh working conditions and exposure to Old World diseases to which they had no immunity.
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1562
Three hundred slaves are obtained by the British and taken to Hispaniola (later Haiti and the Dominican Republic).
 
 
 1565
The Spanish take slaves to St. Augustine, the first permanent settlement in what would later be the state of Florida.
 
 
1619
A Dutch ship with 20 African slaves aboard arrives at the English colony of Jamestown, Virginia.
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 1650
The Yoruba Oyo empire begins a century of ascendancy in what would later be southwestern Nigeria. The empire remains at its apogee for about a century.
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c. 1700
The Asante begin to supply slaves to British and Dutch traders on the southwestern coast of Africa (later southern Ghana) in return for firearms with which to support their territorial expansion.
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 1707
A South African census lists 1,779 Dutch settlers owning 1,107 slaves.
 
 
 1735
Carolus Linnaeus begins his classification of all then-known animal forms, ultimately including humans with primates and providing a model for modern racial classification.
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 1739
The Stono Rebellion, one of the earliest slave insurrections, leads to the deaths of at least 20 whites and more than 40 blacks west of Charleston in the black-majority colony of South Carolina.
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 1746
Lucy Terry composes the poem "Bars Fight," the earliest extant poem by an African American. Transmitted orally for more than 100 years, it first appears in print in 1855.
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 1760
Jupiter Hammon writes an autobiography often considered to be the first slave narrative.
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 1770
Crispus Attucks, an escaped slave, is killed by British soldiers in the Boston Massacre. He is one of the first men to die in the cause of American independence.
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 c. 1772
Jean-Baptist-Point Du Sable builds a fur-trading post on the Chicago River at Lake Michigan. Its success leads to the settlement that later becomes the city of Chicago.
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1773
Phillis Wheatley, the first notable black woman poet in the United States, is acclaimed in Europe and America following publication in England of her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, the first book of African American literature.
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 1777
Vermont, not yet part of the United States, becomes the first colony to constitutionally abolish slavery.
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 1779
The first of a series of intermittent wars known as the Cape Frontier Wars is fought between the Cape colonists of South Africa and the Xhosa people. The wars last until 1879.
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1789
Olaudah Equiano publishes his two-volume autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself, pioneering the slave narrative.
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