The Americas and Sub-Saharan Africa

Three American states, three ways of holding territory

• The Mexica (Aztec) ran a tribute empire. Conquered city-states kept their own rulers and gods but delivered goods, cloth and captives to Tenochtitlan. Farming rested on chinampas, raised beds in the lake that produced several harvests a year. Human sacrifice was not private cruelty; it was state ritual that justified war and displayed power to visiting subject lords.
• The Inca ran a labour empire. Instead of tribute in goods they took the mit'a, a rotating labour obligation, and used it to build roads, terraces and storehouses. Records travelled on quipu knotted cords; officials and armies travelled on some 40,000 km of road. Split inheritance — a dead emperor kept his estates — pushed each new ruler to conquer more land.
• Mississippian societies were chiefdoms, not empires. Cahokia was a large mound-building centre organised around a paramount chief and maize agriculture, without writing or standing bureaucracy.

African states: gold, salt and the sea

• Mali taxed the gold-salt trade. Mansa Musa's pilgrimage of 1324 advertised its wealth, and Timbuktu became a centre of Islamic learning — but Islam was strongest among merchants and the court, while rural practice stayed local.
• Swahili city-states on the East African coast were Muslim, commercial and independent of one another; the Swahili language is Bantu in structure with Arabic and Persian loanwords — the trade relationship written into grammar.
• Great Zimbabwe grew on cattle, gold and inland trade, and built massive dry-stone enclosures without adopting Islam.
• Ethiopia remained Christian, ruled from a mountain plateau, and cut its churches out of solid rock at Lalibela.

Why the exam asks about these regions

They give clean comparisons. Two states solved the same problem — extracting a surplus from a wide territory without coinage — in two different ways: tribute in goods versus tribute in labour. That is a comparison question waiting to be written.