The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the northern belt of West Africa may be viewed as a period of transition between the collapse of Songhay, the last of the great western Sudanic empires, and the rise of the revivalist militant Islamic movements which shaped the western Sudan in the nineteenth century, prior to the colonial occupation.

The period under survey opened with the Moroccan conquest of Timbuktu, and relations between Morocco and the Sudan remained a principal theme throughout. The history of the middle Niger valley evolved around the unsuccessful attempt of the arma, heirs to the Moroccan conquerors, to build an effective government in place of the political structure of the Sudanic empires. All the great empires in the Sudan achieved political supremacy through military conquest, and each had its own ethnic group - Soninke, Malinke or Songhay - as its nucleus. In these cases, however, conquest and domination were mitigated by social and cultural values common to all peoples of the western Sudan. People moved quite freely across ethnic boundaries to be integrated into parallel strata of society. The pashalik of Timbuktu, on the other hand, was based on an unmitigated conquest by an alien group, imbued with a sense of superiority of the white over the black. In the Sudanic empires there was much in common between the local forms of socio-political organization and the administration of the central government. There was also a continuity from one empire to its successor. There was little in common between the organization of the military ruling caste of the arma and that of the conquered population, and there was little continuity from the former imperial structures.