Popular discourses on globalization and many global histories do not have much to say about Africa, despite significant advances in global history's engagements with Africa in recent decades. The continent generally only features to the extent that it trades, usually as subordinate partner, with the rest of the world or is penetrated by foreign merchants and colonizers. Such accounts approach the continent's integration into world markets from without. This literature thus emphasizes colonial transport infrastructure, export trade, and forms of labor that feed directly into global markets, including wage labor and cash cropping. The historiography on African mobility and labor, however, opens up promising avenues for better integrating the continent into global history. African historians' growing focus on local mobility and informal trade, on the ways in which Africans took part in shaping connections with global markets, and on productive activities not geared towards export allows us to reframe Africa in global history as more than a passive victim of colonialism, the slave trade, or global capital.Africa does not feature prominently in popular discourses on globalization. 1 To the extent that the continent is discussed, most often in accounts from progressive scholars, it is frequently only seen as a victim of global processes, not as an actor. 2 Moreover, despite the great strides that have been made in recent decades, global history too has generally paid scant attention to Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa in particular. 3 Several otherwise excellent global histories and histories of globalization 4 only mention the continent when it trades slaves, minerals, or cash crops with the West and in the context of colonization -i.e., as a realm of extraction. 5 When these works do address Africa, they generally consider the continent from without; in other words, they see Africa as relevant when it trades and exchanges with other parts of the world, usually as a passive partner, and when it is penetrated by European, Arab, South Asian, or other traders and colonists. Nevertheless, in recent decades, historians of Africa and Africanists turned global historians have brought useful new perspectives to studying Africa in global history, particularly through the study of mobility and labor.For a long time, however, historians of Africa have been conspicuously absent from the field of global history, at least partially because they were often concerned to show that the continent has its own history that does not derive from outside intervention. 6 Even fields in which Africa should feature prominently, such as the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, have often been dominated by Americanists and Asianists, respectively. Atlantic history has too often been written as the history of colonial societies in the Americas or as imperial history in an Atlantic setting. 7 Africa thus becomes, in the words of Pernille Ipsen, "an opening chapter … an exporter of peoples and cultures whose stories unfolded elsewhere;" and "most of the...