Trade
The capital Sennar, prosperous through trade, hosted representatives from all over the Middle East and Africa. The wealth and power of the sultans had long rested on the control of the economy. All caravans were controlled by the monarch, as was the gold supply that functioned as the state's main currency. In time this power was eroded. Foreign currencies became widely used by merchants breaking the power of the monarch to closely control the economy. The thriving trade created a wealthy class of educated and literate merchants, who read widely about Islam and became much concerned about the lack of orthodoxy in the kingdom. The monarchy of Sennar had long been regarded as semi-divine, in keeping with ancient traditions, but this idea ran strongly counter to Islam. Many festivals and rituals also persisted from earlier days, and a number them involved massive consumption of alcohol. These traditions were also abandoned.
Read more about this topic: Sennar (sultanate)
Famous quotes containing the word trade:
“It passes, and we stay:
A quality of loss
Affecting our content,
As trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a sacrament.”
—Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
“Conversation is a traffick; and if you enter into it, without some stock of knowledge, to ballance the account perpetually betwixt you,—the trade drops at once: and this is the reason ... why travellers have so little [good] conversation with natives,—owing to their [the natives’] suspicion ... that there is nothing to be extracted from the conversation ... worth the trouble of their bad language.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“International relations is security, it’s trade relations, it’s power games. It’s not good-and-bad. But what I saw in Yugoslavia was pure evil. Not ethnic hatred—that’s only like a label. I really had a feeling there that I am observing unleashed human evil ...”
—Natasha Dudinska (b. c. 1967)