Before the Roman Empire, Ancient Egypt was one of the world's most prosperous and advanced civilizations. The port of Alexandria, founded by Alexander the Great in 334 BC, was a hub for Mediterranean trade for centuries. Well into the 19th century, Egypt remained one of the most developed regions outside Europe.

South of the Sahara conditions were different. Internal trade within the continent, hindered by thick forests and massive deserts, was always difficult. Prosperity in sub-Saharan Africa was rare, excepting Nubia, Ethiopia, Mali and Ghana, which had trade routes north to the Mediterranean world and Middle East.

New technologies and the development of civilization made trading easier. For most of the first millennium AD, the Axumite Kingdom had a prosperous trade empire on the eastern horn, where the modern states of Ethiopia and Eritrea lie. Axum had a powerful navy and traded as far as the Byzantine Empire, India, and possibly China. The introduction of the camel by North African Arab conquerors in the 10th century opened trade across the Sahara for the first time. The profits from the gold and salt trades created powerful empires in the western Sahel including the Kingdom of Ghana and the Mali and Kanem-Bornu Empires, where travellers reported vast wealth. Arabs helped build a maritime trade along Africa's east coast, which prospered as Swahili traders exported ivory and slaves across the Indian Ocean.

Further south empires were less common, with the notable exception of Great Zimbabwe. In the Great Lakes region, states such as Rwanda, Burundi, and Buganda became strongly centralized, due to its high population and agricultural surplus.

In the 15th century, Portuguese traders circumvented the Saharan trade route and began to trade directly with Guinea. Other European traders followed, rapidly boosting prosperity in Western Africa. States flourished, including the Kingdom of Benin, Dahomey, and the Ashanti Confederacy. Loose federations of city states such as those of the Yoruba and Hausa were common. However, this wealth was principally based on the slave trade, which collapsed following the abolition of slavery and later European colonization.

Although Europeans were ostensibly committed to developing their colonies, colonial rulers employed a laissez-faire strategy during the first decades. It was hoped that European companies would prosper if given a secure operating environment. This only occurred in a few areas with rich resources; the colonial economies hardly grew from the 1890s through the 1920s. The colonies had to pay their own way, receiving little or no development money from Europe. Only in the 1930s, with the rise of Keynesian economics, did the colonial administrations seriously encourage development. However, new projects could not transpire until after the Great Depression and the Second World War.

African economies boomed during the 1950s as growth and international trade multiplied beyond their pre-war levels. The insatiable demand for raw materials in the rebuilding economies of Asia and Europe and the strong growth in North America inflated the price of raw materials. By the end of the colonial era in the 1960s, there was great hope for African self-sufficience and prosperity. However, sporadic growth continued as the newly independent nations borrowed heavily from abroad.

The world economic decline of the 1970s, rising oil prices, corruption, and political instability hit Africa hard. In subsequent decades Africa has steadily become poorer compared to the rest of the world; South America experienced solid growth, and East Asia spectacular growth, during that same period. According to the World Economic Forum, ten percent of the a world's poor were African In 1970; by 2000, that figure had risen to fifty percent. Between 1974 and 2000 the average income declined by $200. Beginning in 1976, the Lomé agreements and Cotonou agreement between the EU and ACP countries, including Sub-Saharan Africa, have structured economic relations between the two regions.