Jih?d in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions

Paul E. Lovejoy

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9780821445839
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

In Jih?d in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions, a preeminent historian of Africa argues that scholars of the Americas and the Atlantic world have not given Africa its due consideration as part of either the Atlantic world or the age of revolutions. The book examines the jih?d movement in the context of the age of revolutions—commonly associated with the American and French revolutions and the erosion of European imperialist powers—and shows how West Africa, too, experienced a period of profound political change in the late eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries. Paul E. Lovejoy argues that West Africa was a vital actor in the Atlantic world and has wrongly been excluded from analyses of the period.

Among its chief contributions, the book reconceptualizes slavery. Lovejoy shows that during the decades in question, slavery expanded extensively not only in the southern United States, Cuba, and Brazil but also in the jih?d states of West Africa. In particular, this expansion occurred in the Muslim states of the Sokoto Caliphate, Fuuta Jalon, and Fuuta Toro. At the same time, he offers new information on the role antislavery activity in West Africa played in the Atlantic slave trade and the African diaspora.

Finally, Jih?d in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions provides unprecedented context for the political and cultural role of Islam in Africa—and of the concept of jih?d in particular—from the eighteenth century into the present. Understanding that there is a long tradition of jih?d in West Africa, Lovejoy argues, helps correct the current distortion in understanding the contemporary jih?d movement in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Africa.

NOTES

Introduction

1. An earlier version of the arguments in this book was presented in a paper at the conference “Les résistances à l’esclavage dans le monde atlantique français à l’ère des Révolutions (1750–1850),” McGill University, Montreal, 3–4 May 2013. A revised version of this paper was published as “Jihād na África Ocidental durante a ‘Era das Revoluções’—Rumo a um Diálogo com Eric Hobsbawm e Eugene Genovese,” Topoi: Revista de História 15, no. 28 (2014): 22–67. The basic thrust of these arguments expands on Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), first published in 1983 and now in its third edition (2011), and my earlier discussion in 1979 at a conference organized by Michael Craton; see Paul E. Lovejoy, “Indigenous African Slavery,” in Roots and Branches: Current Directions in Slave Studies, ed. Michael Craton,(Toronto: Pergamon Press, 1979), 19–61, originally published in Historical Reflections / Reflexions Historiques 6, no. 1 (1979), 19–61, with commentaries by Igor Kopytoff and Frederick Cooper, 62–83.

2. See Paul Lubeck, “Islamic Protest under Semi-industrial Capitalism: Yan Tatsine Explained,” Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute 54, no. 4 (1985): 369–89; and William Hansen, “Boko Haram: Religious Radicalism and Insurrection in Northern Nigeria,” Journal of Asian and African Studies (2015): 1–19.

3. See especially Paul E. Lovejoy and Steven Baier, “The DesertSide Economy of the Central Sudan,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 8, no. 4 (1975): 551–81; reprinted in Drought in the Sahel: The Politics of a Natural Disaster, ed. Michael Glantz (New York: Praeger, 1976), 145–75; Paul E. Lovejoy and J. S. Hogendorn, “Slave Marketing in West Africa,” in The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, ed. Henry Gemery and J. S. Hogendorn (New York: Academic Press, 1979), 213–35; Paul E. Lovejoy, “The Characteristics of Plantations in the Nineteenth-Century Sokoto Caliphate (Islamic West Africa),” American Historical Review 85, no. 5 (1979): 1267–92; Lovejoy, “The Internal Trade of West Africa, 1450–1800,” in History of West Africa, rev. ed., ed. J. F. A. Ajayi and Michael Crowder (London: Longman Group, 1985), 1:640–90; Lovejoy, “The Central Sudan and the Atlantic Slave Trade,” in Paths toward the Past: African Historical Essays in Honor of Jan Vansina, ed. Robert W. Harms, Joseph C. Miller, David C. Newbury, and Michelle D. Wagner (Atlanta: African Studies Association Press, 1994), 345–70; Lovejoy, “Background to Rebellion: The Origins of Muslim Slaves in Bahia,” Slavery and Abolition 15, no. 2 (1994): 151–80; Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, “Competing Markets for Male and Female Slaves: Slave Prices in the Interior of West Africa, 1780–1850,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 28, no. 2 (1995): 261–93; Paul E. Lovejoy, “The Clapperton-Bello Exchange: The Sokoto Jihād and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 1804–1837,” in The Desert Shore: Literatures of the African Sahel, ed. Christopher Wise (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000), 201–28; Lovejoy, ed., Identity in the Shadow of Slavery (London: Continuum, 2000); Lovejoy, “The Black Atlantic in the Construction of the ‘Western’ World: Alternative Approaches to the ‘Europeanization’ of the Americas,” in The Historical Practice of Diversity: Transcultural Interactions from the Early Modern Mediterranean to the Postcolonial World, ed. Dirk Hoerder, Christiane Harzig, and Adrian Shubert (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), 109–33; Lovejoy, ed., Slavery on the Frontiers of Islam (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2004); Lovejoy, “The Urban Background of Enslaved Muslims in the Americas,” Slavery and Abolition 26, no. 3 (2005): 347–72; Lovejoy, Ecology and Ethnography of Muslim Trade in West Africa (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2005); Lovejoy, Slavery, Commerce and Production in West Africa: Slave Society in the Sokoto Caliphate (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2005); Lovejoy, “The Context of Enslavement in West Africa: Ahmad Bābā and the Ethics of Slavery,” in Slaves, Subjects, and Subversives: Blacks in Colonial Latin America, ed. Jane Landers (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 9–38; Lovejoy, “Internal Markets or an Atlantic-Sahara Divide? How Women Fit into the Slave Trade of West Africa,” in Women and Slavery, ed. Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007), 259–80; Lovejoy, “Patterns in Regulation and Collaboration in the Slave Trade of West Africa,” Leidschrift 22, no. 1 (2007): 41–57; Lovejoy, “Transatlantic Transformations: The Origins and Identities of Africans in the Americas,” in Africa, Brazil, and the Construction of Trans-Atlantic Black Identities, ed. Boubacar Barry, Livio Sansone, and Elisée Soumonni (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2008), 81–112; Lovejoy, “The Slave Trade as Enforced Migration in the Central Sudan,” in Removing Peoples: Forced Removal in the Modern World, ed. Claudia Haake and Richard Bessel (London: German Historical Institute, 2009), 149–66; Behnaz A. Mirzai, Ismael Musah Montana, and Paul E. Lovejoy, eds., Slavery, Islam and Diaspora (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2009); Paul E. Lovejoy, “Esclavitud y comercio esclavista en el África Occidental: Investigaciones en curso,” in Debates históricos contemporáneos: Africanos y afrodescendientes en México y Centroamérica, ed. María Elisa Velázquez (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Anthropología e Historia, 2011), 35–58; Lovejoy, “Diplomacy in the Heart of Africa: British-Sokoto Negotiations over the Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade,” in Distant Ripples of British Abolition in Africa, Asia and the Americas, ed. Myriam Cottias and Marie-Jeanne Rossignol (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, forthcoming); Paul E. Lovejoy and Suzanne Schwarz, eds., Slavery, Abolition and the Transition to Colonialism in Sierra Leone (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2014); Jennifer Lofkrantz and Paul E. Lovejoy, “Maintaining Network Boundaries: Islamic Law and Commerce from Sahara to Guinea Shores,” Slavery and Abolition 36, no. 2 (2015): 211–32; and Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery.

4. Dale W. Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and World Economy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004); Anthony E. Kaye, “The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century South and the Atlantic World,” Journal of Southern History 75, no. 3 (2009): 175–95. Also see Tomich, “The ‘Second Slavery’: Bonded Labor and the Transformations of the Nineteenth-Century World Economy,” in Rethinking the Nineteenth Century: Contradictions and Movement, ed. Francisco O. Ramírez (New York: Greenwood, 1988), 103–17; Tomich, “The Wealth of the Empire: Francisco de Arango y Parreno, Political Economy, and the Second Slavery in Cuba,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 1 (2003): 4–28; Dale W. Tomich and Michael Zeuske, eds., “The Second Slavery: Mass Slavery, World-Economy, and Comparative Microhistories, Part II,” special issue, Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center 31 (2008); Dale W. Tomich, “Atlantic History and World Economy: Concepts and Constructions,” Proto Sociology: An International Journal of Interdisciplinary Research 20 (2004): 102–21; and Michael Zeuske, “Historiography and Research Problems of Slavery and the Slave Trade in a Global-Historical Perspective,” International Review of Social History 57, no. 1 (2012): 87–111.

1. The Age of Revolutions and the Atlantic World

1. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (New York: Vintage Books, 1996 [1962]), ix.

2. Eugene Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979).

3. David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Introduction: The Age of Revolutions, c. 1760–1840—Global Causation, Connection, and Comparison,” in The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840, ed. David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), xii.

4. Joseph C. Miller, “The Dynamics of History in Africa and the Atlantic ‘Age of Revolutions,’” in Armitage and Subrahmanyam, Age of Revolutions in Global Context, 101–24.

5. For a reformulation of this perspective that Africa was involved in the Atlantic world only through the actions of the enslaved who were taken to the Americas, see Wim Klooster, “Slave Revolts, Royal Justice, and a Ubiquitous Rumor in the Age of Revolutions,” William and Mary Quarterly 71, no. 3 (2014): 401–24.

6. The brilliant insights of Barbara Solow in her analysis of Eric Williams’s thesis have been conveniently combined, with additional analysis, in The Economic Consequences of the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York: Lexington Books, 2014).

7. David Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 11–27 (quotation, 11). See Patrick Griffin, “A Plea for a New Atlantic History,” William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 2 (2011): 236.

8. James Sidbury and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “Mapping Ethnogenesis in the Early Modern Atlantic,” William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 2 (2011): 181–208; but see Griffin, “Plea for a New Atlantic History,” 236–39.

9. On Mahdism, see Muhammad Al-Hajj, “The Thirteenth Century in Muslim Eschatology: Mahdist Expectations in the Sokoto Caliphate,” Research Bulletin, Centre of Arabic Documentation (Ibadan) 3, no. 2 (1967): 100–113; R. A. Adeleye, “Rabih Fadlallah, 1879–1893: Exploits and Impact on Political Relations in Central Sudan,” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 5, no. 2 (1970): 223–42; Muhammad Al-Hajj, “Hayatu b. Sa’id: A Revolutionary Mahdist in the Western Sudan,” in The Sudan in Africa: Studies Presented to the First International Conference Sponsored by the Sudan Research Unit, ed. Y. Fadl Hasan (Khartoum: Khartoum University Press, 1971), 128–41; Martin Z. Njeuma, “Adamawa and Mahdism: The Career of Hayatu ibn Said in Adamawa, 1878–1898,” Journal of African History 12, no. 1 (1971): 61–77; Saburi Biobaku and Muhammad Al-Hajj, “The Sudanese Mahdiyya and the Niger-Chad Region,” in Islam in Tropical Africa, ed. I. M. Lewis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 425–39; John E. Lavers, “Jibril Gaini: A Preliminary Account of the Career of a Mahdist Leader in North-eastern Nigeria,” Research Bulletin, Centre of Arabic Documentation (Ibadan) 3, no. 1 (1967): 16–38; Paul E. Lovejoy and Jan Hogendorn, “Revolutionary Mahdism and Resistance to Colonial Rule in the Sokoto Caliphate, 1905–1906,” Journal of African History 31, no...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Maps
• List of Plates
• Acknowledgments
• Glossary
• Orthography
• Introduction
• One. The Age of Revolutions and the Atlantic World
• Two. The Origins of Jihād in West Africa
• Three. The Jihād of ‘Uthmān dan Fodio in the Central Bilād al-Sūdān
• Four. The Economic Impact of Jihād in West Africa
• Five. Jihād and the Slave Trade
• Six. The Repercussions of Jihād in the Americas
• Seven. Sokoto, the Jihād States, and the Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade
• Eight. Empowering History Trajectories across the Cultural and Religious Divide
• Appendix: Population Estimates for the Sokoto Caliphate, ca. 1905–15
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index