Atlantic” was shaped by influences from the deep African interior.34 Similarly, a transnational and global perspective suggests modifications of the approach of Bernard Bailyn and David Brion Davis in examining European and European settler control of the Atlantic world.35 Although scholars studying Atlantic history recognize that the overwhelming number of people who crossed the Atlantic before the middle of the nineteenth century came from Africa, not Europe, and that this demography had a significant impact, especially as a contributing factor in slave resistance, sense of community, and commercial interaction, the connection with historical developments in Africa deserves fuller attention. A focus on the black Atlantic has to address why parts of Africa, at least Muslim areas, were able to retain a degree of autonomy.
Central to the argument of this book and my dialogue with Hobsbawm, Genovese, and other scholars who analyze the age of revolutions without reference to Islamic West Africa is that the age of jihād has been largely overlooked. I suggest that locating jihād in the interpretation of the age of revolutions and the Atlantic world challenges our understanding of the modern era and provides a corrective that parallels a recognition of Haiti’s place in that analysis. The jihād movement shaped the slave trade from the late eighteenth century through the nineteenth century and reveals the importance of Islam in explaining the supply of slaves, a crucial insight with profound implications for our understanding of the trade, the origins of Africans sent to the Americas, and ethnicity in the Americas. I maintain that a fuller understanding of the age of revolutions requires the application of historical methodology that seeks out sources and interpretations that can test conceptual hypotheses and intellectual insights. The main problem is that both Hobsbawm and Genovese, and much of the scholarship since they set the direction of research, shaped a model for the modern world that provides a European focus on the history of the Western world, despite the opposition of many scholars to such a Eurocentric perspective. The question to be addressed is whether it is possible to ignore Africa, in this case West Africa, in the reconstruction of the history of the Atlantic world during this period.
Of course, the chronological framework of the age of revolutions shifts from scholar to scholar; Hobsbawm emphasized the years 1789–1848, while Wim Klooster begins the period earlier with “civil war” in the British Empire and the independence of the United States. The Age of Revolution of David Brion Davis begins in 1770 and ends in 1823. Jane Landers associates the age of revolutions with resistance to slavery from the second half of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century. Whether or not the era is considered to have begun in the 1770s and to have ended with the American Civil War of the 1860s depends on the focus of analysis, but the general idea of an “age of revolutions” has become Atlantic-wide in its orientation.36 For Landers, the age of revolutions is more concerned with the international quest for liberty coming from slaves and free blacks than with nationalist discourse, and hence her analysis ends in 1850, while Manuel Barcia ends his study in 1844.37 The jihād movement fits into this chronology regardless of whether the period is thought to begin in the 1770s or 1789 and end in 1848 or the 1860s. During this era virtually the whole of the interior of West Africa from Senegambia to Lake Chad came under the rule of jihād states that swept away the preexisting political structures, with quite significantly different results that help expand the concept of the Atlantic world to include West Africa.
Perspectives on History
What was common in West Africa was the Islamic context, not the identification as Hausa, Yoruba, Mandingo, Juula, Fulbe, and so on. I contend that ethnicity was an extension of political identity, and its meaning has to be deconstructed. Ethnic labeling was transferred to the Americas, often buttressed with identification with a common language, like Yoruba, Igbo, Kimbundu, or Kikongo. In the context of the jihād movement in West Africa, Fulfulde and Arabic were the primary languages of the religious and political elite, but Hausa and Mandinke were dominant over wide regions and were closely associated with trade. Hence these languages and their corresponding labeling in the Americas as Hausa or Mandinga/Mandingo reflected African backgrounds that need to be tied more closely to our understanding of Atlantic history. The role of Fulbe clerics was particularly important in spreading jihād ideology (plate 2). These distinctions were important in Bahia and helped shape resistance. In other words, if the Bahia uprising is to be considered within an Atlantic perspective during the age of revolutions, it has to be seen in the context of events in West Africa. To a great extent the transatlantic dimension is missing this perspective, particularly with reference to the jihād states of those portions of the interior known as the western and central Bilād al-Sūdān. By the eighteenth century “Bilād al-Sūdān,” the Arabic term for “land of the blacks,” had come to designate the savanna and Sahel regions bordering the southern Sahara and specifically identified the Islamic states that dominated this region. Indeed, in some sources from the nineteenth century, the term “Soudan” is the name used for the Sokoto Caliphate, as distinct from Borno, for example.
The presence of enslaved Muslims in the Americas is well established, although the connection or lack thereof with the jihād movement depended on a number of factors that reveal the intersection between the jihād movement and the age of revolutions and the major transformations in slave resistance in the Americas. The experiences of Muslims in Bahia, where Yoruba became the common language of the Muslim community, even though that community also included other Muslims who were not Yoruba in origin, helps us understand the age of jihād. As I examine in this book, there are many accounts of individuals whose lives relate to the jihād movement, including Richard Pierpoint, who was enslaved in Fuuta Bundu and fought on the side of the British in the American War of Independence and then with Canadian troops who repulsed the American invasion of the Niagara Peninsula in the War of 1812. Similarly, Muhammad Kabā Saghanughu, enslaved in 1777 near Fuuta Jalon, subsequently led a Muslim community in Jamaica until his death in 1845, while Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua was enslaved near Djougou in the year of Kabā’s death and, after being in Brazil for two years (1845–47), was able to escape in New York; Baquaqua subsequently wanted to head a Baptist mission to Africa, but this never happened. Finally, Muhammed ʿAlī Saʿīd, who was enslaved in Borno in 1851, when Baquaqua was at Central College in upstate New York, traveled through the Ottoman Empire and then to Europe, the Caribbean, and North America before joining the Union army in 1863, although he had never been enslaved in the United States. All were Muslims, and their stories help connect the worlds of revolution and jihād.
The problem is one of perspective. A consideration of slave resistance and revolution in the Atlantic world has tended to focus on the Americas and Europe without attempting to understand what was happening in Africa. The “age of revolutions” as a concept and a chronological period of history owes a great debt to Hobsbawm, Genovese, and other scholars. The chronicle of historical change from the last decades of the eighteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth century has been isolated as a phase in the history of slavery and specifically its demise that was associated with revolutionary change in western Europe. As we are all aware, the abolition movement in Britain, the French Revolution, the uprising in St. Domingue, the independence of Haiti, and slave resistance from the United States to Brazil figure prominently in our understanding of this period of history and its interface with the emerging Industrial Revolution and the constitutional restrictions or outright elimination of monarchal rule in western Europe. Consequently, this book is a dialogue with Hobsbawm and Genovese, and by extension with the dominant literature on slavery and resistance in the Americas, Atlantic studies, and comparative history.
My dialogue with these scholars and the trend in historiography that derives from their inspiration, especially the emergence of Atlantic studies and the “black Atlantic” paradigm, concentrates on the events in Africa that occurred during the period of the age of revolutions and how these events in Africa might or might not have helped shape the patterns of change in the Americas that led to the destruction of slavery as the dominant institution there. How are we to conceptualize African history and the origins of people from Africa who were involved in the revolutionary events of the Americas? I contend that influences emanating from Africa and specifically the jihād movement in West Africa had a profound impact on the shaping of revolutionary forces in the Americas. The jihād
