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       Implications of the Jihād Movement

      The long-term implications of the jihād movement are clear. As Last has observed, jihād altered the course of West African history:

      The Islamic reform movement in West Africa gave rise to the largest unitary state in nineteenth-century Africa [i.e., the Sokoto Caliphate]. It inspired a literature greater in quantity and higher in learning than any previously seen south of the Sahara. It laid down conditions for generating one of the most productive indigenous economies in West Africa in the later nineteenth century. Indeed, the movement is as central to West African history as is, for example, the French Revolution to Europe.⁸³

      The timing and direction of West African reformist thought paralleled the European world. According to Last, there is a need to “examine the underlying causes of these changes and the ways by which they might have affected West Africa.”⁸⁴ Moreover, I argue, the events in Africa must be incorporated into conceptions of the Atlantic world during the age of revolutions; however, the extent to which the events in West Africa shaped or did not shape the Americas and Europe and the ways in which the age of revolutions affected the jihād movement are debatable. As I argue here, the transatlantic world and Islamic West Africa were autonomous, largely disentangled in ways that helped define the Atlantic world.