Why precolonial Africa didn't have the wheel

"The conventional notion that Africans failed to employ the wheel because of lack of initiative or intelligence is intellectually unsatisfactory, not so much because it is racialist as because it is circular: Africans are supposed to have ignored the wheel because they were unenterprising, and the evidence that they were unenterprising is that they failed to adopt the wheel."
---Robin Law, “Wheeled Transport in Pre-Colonial West Africa,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 50, no. 3 (1980), p. 257

0:00 Introduction
1:34 What's so special about wheels, anyway?
6:02 Why didn't Europe adopt the camel?
8:02 Trypanosomiasis and the tsetse
9:32 Arid areas of East and Southern Africa without the tsetse
10:30 Appeal to Africa specialists
11:08 Cigarettes and pennies

FOOTNOTES

[1] K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 110

[2] W. T. Jackman, The Development of Transportation in Modern England, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1916), vol. 1, p. 22
Edward Whiting Fox, History in Geographic Perspective: The Other France (New York: Norton, 1971), p. 34
William H. McNeill, “The Eccentricity of Wheels, or Eurasian Transportation in Historical Perspective,” American Historical Review, 92, no. 5 (December 1987), pp. 1111-13
For a somewhat contrasting view (that still shows water transport to be cheaper than land), see James Masschaele, “Transport Costs in Medieval England,” in The Economic History Review, 46, no. 2 (May 1993), pp. 266-79

[3] Jackman, The Development of Transportation in Modern England, pp. 8-9

[4] Jackman, The Development of Transportation in Modern England, p. 5
McNeill, “The Eccentricity of Wheels,” p. 1111

[5] McNeill, “The Eccentricity of Wheels,” pp. 1123-25
Yi-Rong Ann Hsu, Clifton W. Pannell, and James O. Wheeler, “The Development and Structure of Transportation Networks in Taiwan: 1600–1972,” in China’s Island Frontier: Studies in the Historical Geography of Taiwan, ed. Ronald G. Knapp (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1980), p. 165
Heather Sutherland, “Geography as Destiny? The Role of Water in Southeast Asian History,” in A World of Water: Rain, Rivers and Seas in Southeast Asian Histories, ed. Peter Boomgaard, Verhandelingen van Het Koninklijk Instituut Voor Taal-, Land- En Volkenkunde 240 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2007), pp. 27–70
For an overview of maritime trade in this region, see Ng Chin-keong, Boundaries and Beyond: China's Maritime Southeast in Late Imperial Times (Singapore: NUS Press, 2017), chapter 1.

[6] Richard W. Bulliet, The Camel and the Wheel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 22-25
A. G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), p. 72

[7] Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa, pp. 71-75
Robin Law, “Wheeled Transport in Pre-Colonial West Africa,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 50, no. 3 (1980), pp. 257-58

[8] T. A. M. Nash, Africa’s Bane: The Tsetse Fly (London: Collins, 1969)
Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa, pp. 71-75
Ralph A. Austen and Daniel Headrick, “The Role of Technology in the African Past,” African Studies Review, 26, no. 3/4 (September 1983), pp. 170-171
Marcella Alsan, “The Effect of the TseTse Fly on African Development,” American Economic Review, 105, no. 1 (January 2015), pp. 382–410 (passim)
See also Law, “Wheeled Transport in Pre-Colonial West Africa,” p. 253

[9] Paul Starkey, “A World-Wide View of Animal Traction Highlighting Some Key Issues in Eastern and Southern Africa,” in Improving Animal Traction Technology: Proceedings of the First Workshop of the Animal Traction Network for Eastern and Southern Africa (ATNESA) (Wageningen, The Netherlands: Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA), 1994), p. 74


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