In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Jihād in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions by Paul E. Lovejoy
  • John H. Hanson
Jihād in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions. By Paul E. Lovejoy (Athens, Ohio University Press, 2016) 396 pp. $90.00 cloth $34.95 paper

Lovejoy challenges Atlantic historians to broaden their horizons when reflecting on the emergence of the modern world. The "age of revolutions" in his book's title refers to the political, industrial, and social transformations in France, Britain, and Haiti that Hobsbawm, Genovese, and other historians stress in their analyses.1 Lovejoy adds another formative transformation to the mix—the militant jihād movements in the West African savanna during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He argues that these Muslim movements, especially the one that created the expansive Sokoto Caliphate in today's northern Nigeria after 1804, had two major influences on the Atlantic world. The West African Muslim elites who came to power no longer sent slaves into networks feeding the transatlantic trade; they put them to work in the savanna. The Muslim rhetoric of the era inspired the African Muslims who led or joined slave revolts in the Americas.

Lovejoy's earlier publications, such as Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (New York, 2012; orig. pub. 1994), revealed that 50 percent (or more) of the population in the savanna was servile by the end of the nineteenth century. In Jihād in West Africa, Lovejoy argues that West African slavery reduced the number of savanna captives entering the transatlantic slave trade, adding that this change was deliberate. Lovejoy agrees with Senegalese historians, such as Boubacar Barry, who [End Page 578] contend that eighteenth-century Senegambian jihād movements succeeded in halting the sale of Muslim captives at the coast.2 Lovejoy makes a similar argument for the Sokoto Caliphate in the first-half of the nineteenth century, before British naval operations ended the transatlantic trade along the southern Nigerian coast. Lovejoy includes compelling evidence—quotations from an Arabic text and a conversation reported by European travelers, both expressing the desire of Muhammad Bello, one of the jihād leaders, to stop selling slaves to merchants trading with Christians at the coast.

Jihād in West Africa also discusses African Muslim involvement in slave resistance in Brazil and Cuba. Lovejoy draws from a growing body of research to stress the significance of African Muslim participation in several slave revolts in the Americas. These Muslims, who had been enslaved before, or in spite of, West African Muslim restrictions on slave trading that Lovejoy discusses, led or joined others in a series of slave rebellions in the early nineteenth century. Fears about continued Muslim resistance led some Brazilian masters to send back to West Africa those understood to be Muslim in hopes of dissipating their influence. Lovejoy suggests that these events—Muslim slave resistance in the Americas and Muslim movements halting the slave sales to the Americas—were not coincidental but interrelated.

Lovejoy refers to "the jihād movement in West Africa" in the singular, but these Muslim movements were diverse, occurring for two centuries and including movements that Lovejoy does not discuss. Although Lovejoy stresses that the jihād leaders in Senegambia and Sokoto were Fulbe (Fulani) Muslims, Robinson, whom he cites, makes this point but distinguishes between the aims of the various movements.3 In addition, West African Muslim scholars did not operate in isolation from reformist currents circulating in the Muslim world. Lovejoy acknowledges the influence of Saharan Muslim scholars on Sokoto leaders, but he does not discuss wider connections between West Africans and reformers elsewhere in the Muslim world.4 Writing Muslim West Africa into the Atlantic world must attend to the confluence of diverse global influences in the savannah and the ways in which local actors took initiatives and elaborated on these perspectives.

Jihād in West Africa is an important work. It provides a useful summary of several West African Muslim movements and challenges historians to reflect on West Africa's influences on the formation of the Atlantic world. It should inspire additional research. Scholars of Muslim West Africa might probe the vast corpus of Arabic documents...

pdf

Share