The Ottoman Empire in south-western Asia; Berber and Arab civilizations across northern Africa; the vast connected Swahili civilizations of the East African littoral; Aksum, Lalibela, Amhara, the Oromo and the many other nations and States in Ethiopia; other regional State and empire formations in contiguous regions such as Egypt, Sudan, and Mali: all buttressed resistance to immersion and encapsulation within the growing capitalist world economies of the New World and the Atlantic. We must be careful not to impose hegemonic European outcomes retroactively, dating them back to the advent of the European presence in Africa and the Indian Ocean, as even some of our best critical scholars sometimes do. The incursions of early colonial expansion certainly caused occasional disruptions throughout parts of the Old World, but rarely the kind of total, hegemonic colonial reorganization at the level of gnosis described in Mudimbe's The Invention of Africa, which is generally a product of the past one or two centuries in most regions of the Old World, though sometimes less.