historical forces. It is surprising that Africa has largely been excluded from the discussion of the Atlantic world and the era of revolutions, except when enslaved Africans were taken to the Americas and expressed their resistance to slavery.5 In introducing African history into this discourse of revolutionary change, the aim is examine how the homelands of enslaved Africans can be brought into the discussion. The period of revolutions in the narrowly defined “Atlantic” world of western Europe and the Americas coincided with an era of jihād that was part of Miller’s “longer cycle of militarization and commercialization.”
Clearly, the economic consequences of the Atlantic slave trade in the development of the global economy were profound, as was long ago recognized by Eric Williams. Barbara Solow, who provides one of the best overviews, has outlined many issues relating to the relative importance of slavery in the economic transformation of the Atlantic world and western Europe, but without any consideration of the African dimension of slavery. Her complete silence on African history, not just the jihād movement, suggests that her analysis has to be taken much further than she dared to go.6 What constituted the Atlantic world in this period, and why is most if not all of Africa excluded from discussion of that conception? It is perhaps not surprising that the idea of Atlantic history has received considerable criticism, but the place of Africa in a global perspective is still largely ignored. As David Armitage has proclaimed, “We are all Atlanticists now,” and an examination of the jihād movement shows how this pronouncement can extend into the interior of West Africa.7 James Sidbury and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra have challenged what is meant by “Africa.” They have shown that various parts of Africa have to be distinguished from each other, and I would add that it has to be determined how different regions fitted into the Atlantic world, if they fitted at all.8 Despite the asymmetrical relationships that characterized the regions that bordered the Atlantic Ocean, it can still be asked what those relationships entailed, even though many scholars have avoided a meaningful discussion. The considerable interest in the origins of enslaved Africans and their influence on the development of the “creole” societies of the Americas might suggest that the study of the Atlantic world would have corrected this distortion, but it has not. In fact, this interest in the origins of enslaved Africans rarely includes an understanding of the historical context in which people were enslaved in Africa, marched to the coast, and sold to the captains of the ships destined to cross the Atlantic. Yet this migration occurred during the age of revolutions, and Africans and people of African descent played a major role in the events of the Caribbean, North America, Brazil, and Hispanic America, and indeed in the abolition movement against the slave trade and slavery.
Cultural influences, such as the religious practices and beliefs of the Yoruba; the resistance of slaves and the assignment of ethnicity to resistance, as with Akan in Jamaica; and the cultural links between Brazil and Angola, as expressed in capoeira, have been central in the study of slavery. Although we know the regions of Africa from which people came, too often the African component is amorphous, timeless, and devoid of the rigorous methodology of historical analysis, except among specialists who have not been concerned with how African regions fitted or did not into the age of revolutions. My contention is that historians of slavery in the Americas and the resistance to slavery in the age of revolutions have sometimes ignored and often misinterpreted and misrepresented the historical context to which a significant proportion of the population of the Americas traced its origins. My aim is to draw attention to the fruits of African historical research so that information on the jihād movement can be incorporated into the historical reconstruction of the Atlantic world. Any conception of the Atlantic world has to include those parts of Africa that actually bordered the Atlantic and thereby helped define the geographical boundaries of analysis. The Atlantic world does extend to the Americas from England, France, Spain, and Portugal, but the connections are not just to Brazil, the Caribbean, Hispanic America, and North America but also to various parts of West Africa and indeed to Angola and Mozambique, whose involvement in the era of revolutions should be considered because of the links of these areas to the Atlantic world. Indeed, without the forced migration of Africans to the Americas, there would not have been an Atlantic world.
My focus here is on the jihād movement of West Africa and specifically the consolidation of states that were founded in jihād and that came to dominate much of West Africa during the same period as the age of revolutions. I argue that, as with western Europe and the Americas, the history of West Africa was also characterized by an age of revolutionary change. Although jihād was not inspired by the same sentiments and forces that characterized the history of Europe and the Americas, there were important similarities and interactions that provide a new perspective on the Atlantic world and the age of revolutions. The jihād movement affected the forms and intensity of slave resistance in the Americas, particularly in Bahia and Cuba. Jihād was also responsible for the continuation of slavery in West Africa on a massive scale. My intention is to demonstrate how the West African jihāds helped shape the Atlantic world and therefore why this history should be incorporated into the analysis of the age of revolutions. Muslims were found in all parts of West Africa except in the coastal forests inland from modern Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire and the interior of the Bight of Biafra (plate 1). Their political control of the interior and their commercial domination of trade almost everywhere were factors that affected the Atlantic world.
When the jihād movement was first identified as a “neglected theme” in West African history in the 1960s, the focus of African historical research was on Christian missions, European colonialism, and the nationalist thrust toward independence. It can be legitimately claimed that since then, the study of Islamic Africa has become a major theme of historical research and analysis, but unfortunately that analysis has often been ignored in the historiography of the Americas. The extensive research that has been undertaken in the past generation has radically transformed our understanding of African history, especially those areas where Islam was predominant. Moreover, with access to the huge libraries of Timbuktu and many other centers, the amount of available documentation has mushroomed, with the result that the study of Islamic West Africa will continue to be subjected to revision and further analysis. Islamic Africa, specifically including sub-Saharan Africa, has come into its own, even without the attention that radical Islam in the form of al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, and other manifestations of contemporary jihād has generated. Despite the recognition that the Islamic presence is substantial, the history of Islam in West Africa has not entered the mainstream of historical analysis. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the silence of historians on West Africa during the age of revolutions, which is seen as focused on Europe and the Atlantic world to the exclusion of Africa and Asia.
There is a long tradition of jihād in the history of the Islamic world, beginning with the initial jihād led by the Prophet Muhammad. Subsequent jihāds of later eras referred back to the founding of Islam and favored strategies and ways of legitimization with reference to the original jihād. The power of this tradition was realized in West Africa, beginning in the last decades of the seventeenth century and becoming manifest in the eighteenth century with the establishment of Fuuta Bundu in the 1690s, Fuuta Jalon in 1727–28 and especially after 1776, and Fuuta Toro in 1775 and most especially in the nineteenth century with the establishment of the Sokoto Caliphate after 1804, the reform of Borno after 1810, and the establishment of Hamdullahi in Masina in the middle Niger basin in 1817. It can be said that by 1835 West Africa had come under the dominance of jihād regimes that would then be expanded further with the launch of the regime established by al-Hājj ‘Umar (map 1.1). As an ideology, a military strategy of conquest, and an intellectual reformation, the jihād movement shaped West Africa and laid the foundation for the conversion of the majority of people in West Africa who were not already Muslims to Islam.
Not only was the region of West Africa transformed, but the influence of the movement that materialized in West Africa eventually reached as far east as the Nilotic Sudan, where the Mahdist state was established after 1884. The Mahdist movement in turn reverberated back westward, challenging the continued legitimacy of the Sokoto Caliphate, Borno, and other Muslim states that had been founded or reformulated as a result of jihād. The incursions of the Mahdist leader, Rābiḥ ibn Faḍl
