and the open warfare that erupted between these states in consequence of the failure to reach an acceptable accord over the course of jihād.48 Similarly, the little-known diplomatic negotiations between Caliph Muhammad Bello, supreme ruler of the Sokoto Caliphate, and Captain Hugh Clapperton, the official representative of the British government, over the abolition of the slave trade in the 1820s bring into focus contradictions in understanding the age of revolutions.49 Their discussions and resulting accord demonstrate that abolition has to be examined from broader perspectives than a British focus.
I contend that the relative importance of Islam as an inhibiting factor in the provision of slaves for the Americas is underestimated. Limitations arising from controlled efforts to isolate West Africa from slavery in the Americas related to Muslim prohibitions.50 First, let us consider that the Muslim states of the region engaged in a conscious attempt within West Africa to establish autonomy. In this regard, there was a relatively clear break in patterns of trade, so that we can talk about at least two phases in the transatlantic migration. The first period was the period before around 1800, and the second was the nineteenth century. The jihād that resulted in the creation of the Sokoto Caliphate after 1804 effectively marked a break in the trade and politics of the deportation of slaves to the Americas between these two phases. Although there was involvement in the transatlantic and trans-Saharan slave trades, the jihād movement undermined the deportation of enslaved Africans to the Americas from West Africa. Even so, there was a recognizable Muslim cohort both in the period before 1804 and after. The second period was also marked by the British campaign to abolish the slave trade after 1807, which initially attacked the trade of West Africa and thereby reinforced the political aims of the Muslim states of the interior to limit participation in the transatlantic slave trade, although unintentionally. The combined impact of Muslim jihād and British abolition reinforced a trend that pushed the slave trade from West Africa to west central Africa and Mozambique, the Bantu-speaking region from where approximately half of all Africans who went to the Americas trace their origins. After 1807, 1.9 million out of 2.78 million Africans came from the Bantu regions, amounting to 68 percent of total arrivals in the Americas, and if the Bight of Biafra is included, 80 percent of the forced migration after British abolition targeted Africans from regions where the jihād movement was not a factor.
The significance of where enslaved people came from has been recognized as an important factor in the slave trade, but analysis so far has not appreciated why Muslim regions were marginal and underrepresented despite their relative importance in Bahia and North America and their limited impact in Jamaica, Trinidad, and St. Domingue. I suggest that during the age of revolutions west central Africa and southeastern Africa were constituted as the principal regions of slave origin, while West Africa was transformed from within by changes that resulted in the consolidation of Islamic rule and were as effective as British abolition in removing the region from the transatlantic slave trade. The basic thrust of this argument is not new.51 However, the argument has either been misunderstood or largely ignored or both, and my aim here is to make the argument explicit.
My challenge is methodological. I am identifying what can be termed “the methodology of the tabula rasa” or can also be called the “argument in empty space,” in which the scholarship of the “other” is overlooked, but its exclusion in the end has to be recognized as a particularly challenging inhibition to historical reconstruction.52 When much of the historiography and readily available source material that underpin historical change is not incorporated into historical analysis, as I am claiming here, it is possible to propose interpretations that are isolated and distorted through a limiting perspective. Much of the scholarship that is associated with “Atlantic studies,” including the attempt to understand slavery and resistance during the age of revolutions, falls into this trap. Although it may not be clear why certain knowledge is overlooked, whether from naïveté, ignorance, or design, we have to assess responsibility for such an approach that shortchanges innovation and hard work. We have to recognize that the aim of scholarship is to overcome the limitations of specific perspectives and to broaden interpretations to take into account new sources, innovative uses of new knowledge, and the inevitably widening circles of inclusion. A methodology of designed ignorance is prevalent in certain studies and historical approaches, in my opinion, and this is the case with an understanding of the jihād of West Africa. In Latin America, this approach of privileging some scholarship by subjecting that of others to silence and nonrecognition is sometimes referred to, informally, as the “methodology of the gringos,” in which North American scholars blitz local archives and subsequently claim to have made intellectual and scholarly breakthroughs that completely bypass the research of scholars in Latin America, especially if scholars write only in Portuguese or Spanish and hence conveniently can be ignored, or if it might require too much extra work and interaction to uncover what is often a wealth of research that has previously been completed or is currently under way. The same observation applies to scholars in Nigeria, such as Yusuf Bala Usman, H. Bobboyi, and A. M. Yakubu.53 These scholars are often ignored in “western” scholarship. The same curtain of silence through nonrecognition is lowered on the intellectual contributions of scholars in Africa and indeed even on scholars who focus on Africa but who are not at universities in Africa. The avoidance of the rich documentation on the jihād movement is even more glaring than I am suggesting, since I have specifically not referred to many of the primary source materials that are readily available in published form, let alone the enormous amount of relevant material that is to be found in archives in Nigeria, Mali, Morocco, France, England, the United States, and elsewhere. Nonetheless, it is central to the argument of this book that a fuller understanding of the age of revolutions requires a revolution in the application of historical methodology that seeks out sources and interpretations that can test conceptual hypotheses and intellectual insights. The question that has to be addressed is whether it is possible to ignore Africa, in this case West Africa, in the reconstruction of history during this period.
Despite the increasingly detailed research on African cultural and social impact in the Americas, the focus on slave resistance and revolution still omits the important components of the period that derive from the African background of the enslaved. I am arguing that the historical trends in the consolidation of Islam in Africa favored the emergence of west central Africa as the dominant region of origins of enslaved Africans, even though it will seem to some scholars that West Africa was a major source of slaves. In fact, hundreds of thousands of enslaved African did come from West Africa, but relatively few came from the Muslim regions of the interior. There is an apparent contradiction, therefore, that has to be explained. Most of the deported enslaved population from West Africa came from near the coast, and hence the region as a whole was underrepresented as a source of slaves.
I contend that the regional origins of Africa have to be contextualized within Africa, just as the destination of slaves and the resulting slave societies in the Americas and within Africa have to be understood in the context of the specificities of the Americas and influences that originated in Europe, particularly western Europe, as well as the historical context of West Africa. The forces that were unleashed in Africa were global, shaped to various degrees by events outside Africa as well as regional and local conditions therein. Theoretically, in terms of demography, I contend, West Africa could have supplied all the slaves that went to the Americas during the age of revolutions, but this did not happen, even though many slaves did come from there. Moreover, just as events in the Americas reveal a struggle between resistance to slavery and efforts to sustain what some had thought a dying institution, events in Africa reflect the great expansion in slavery, not its demise, so that the focus on revolutionary change in relation to resistance to slavery has to take into account the destination of the enslaved population, whether that population remained in Africa or went to the Americas. The West African experience has a bearing on another important debate. Sociologist and historian Dale Tomich has suggested the concept of “second slavery,” in which slavery in the Americas was not a dying institution.54 Rather, in Tomich’s view, slavery was increasing in the early nineteenth century thanks to a new political order imposed by the British after the fall of Napoleon. Hence the parallel to the great expansion of slavery as a result of the jihād in West Africa should be noted.
As
