African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa, by Michael A. Gomez, focuses on the regions surrounding the Middle Niger Valley.

[10][11] Concisely surveying prehistory back to around 7000 BCE,[10] the chapter presents the region "as an archetypical riverain geopolitical core for the complex panoply of events to follow",[11] and takes its story to the emergence of the Ghana Empire around 300 CE.

Gomez argues that the emergence of the Almoravid dynasty, their eleventh-century conquest of northern part of Africa's Atlantic coast, and the rise of the state of Takrur are indicative of a wave of Sunni, fundamentalist Islam in the Middle Niger.

[7] Gomez defines race for his purposes as "the culturally orchestrated, socially sanctioned disaggregation and reformulation of the human species into broad, hierarchical categories reflecting purported respective levels of capacity, propensity, and beauty, and in ways often tethered to phenotypic expression".

[7] Gomez contends that the rise of trans-Saharan trade was accompanied by a concomitant process associating the Sūdān ever more closely with slaves, arguing that the notion of Bilād al-Sūdān was a "racialization of space".

[9] Chapter 9, "The Sunni and the Scholars: A Tale of Revenge", focuses on the Arabic-language West-African writing which constitutes the key source material for Songhay rests, and the Muslim holy men who created it.

[11] This chapter analysis of two of Gomez's key primary sources, the West-African chronicles Tārīkh al-Sūdān (c. 1652, by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn ʿImrān al-Saʾdī) and Taʾrīkh al-fattāsh (c. 1519–1665, attributed to Maḥmūd Kaʾti), which focus on the rise and fall of imperial Songhay.

According to Amir Syed, Gomez argues that whereas Sunni ʿAlī "'would embark upon a strategy of attacking one community of scholars associated with his political nemesis, while embracing an alternative group of more neutral elites'", Askia al-Ḥājj Muḥammad was part of a "'renaissance' that reestablished the importance of urban centers, and 'reconnections with polities and luminaries in the central Islamic lands'".

[11] Chapter 12, "Of Fitnas and Fratricide: The Nadir of Imperial Songhay" focuses on the twenty years of civil strife and chaos following the toppling of Askia al-Ḥājj Muḥammad's reign.

[3] Surveying responses to the book, Hadrien Collet found that "il est possible d’observer deux tendances globalement parallèles quant à la réception du livre.

On the one hand, the community of researchers specializing in the African Middle Ages has been quite severe; on the other, American, Africanist, and more generalist historical criticism has praised a necessary and indispensable book").

[10] Collet noted, however, that "le livre est exigeant, écrit dans un langage châtié, voire parfois abstrait" ("the book is demanding, written in sophisticated, sometimes indeed abstract, language").