Jihād in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions - Paul E. Lovejoy

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that is foreign and that cannot be documented.

      The jihād movement was revolutionary, as I document in this book. Interpretations of Islam were fundamentally changed as a result of jihād. Not only were existing governments overthrown and new states established, which were revolutionary acts in themselves, but also the centrality of Islam to society and social relationships was consolidated in ways that had not been the case previously. Most of the savanna and the Sahel had long been part of Dar al-Islam, the world of Islam, but the establishment of the jihād states intensified the practice of Islam among elites, merchants, and the general population in ways that affected the meanings of ethnicity. I have previously attempted to present a more sophisticated analytical approach and perspective on understanding identity in the context of West Africa, which I have characterized as a “methodology through the ethnic lens.” As I have explained, ethnicity is a complicated phenomenon that is situational. References in the sources to what is considered “ethnic” require explication to discover what is meant and what is not. Ethnicity is complex, both changing and not changing. Hausa and Mande had existed as identities related to language and culture for hundreds of years before the period that is the focus of this book. Patterns of scarification and cultural upbringing reinforced these identities over very wide geographical regions involving very large populations. Recognition of the ethnic factor is only the first step in understanding the revolutionary impact of the jihād movement on political structures and economic underpinnings that once may have been referred to as modes of production and social formations.

      Many scholars have attempted to confront the perplexing dilemma of ethnic terminology that sometimes seems to confuse attempts to understand African history. This perplexity especially applies to scholars of the Atlantic world and scholars of slavery in the Americas; a comparable dilemma of ethnic terminology does not seem to affect the analysis of European history, when there was no such identification in the ongoing frictions among France, England, Spain, Portugal, and other “European” countries. The origins of people, how they have identified in different contexts, and the languages individuals have spoken are repeatedly confused and often fused. The same methodology should be employed in the disaggregation of context and the explanation of relationships for people of European and African background. If we examine the age of revolutions as a unifying feature of history in the world of western Europe and the Americas, we need to understand the age of jihād in West Africa during the same period. The implications for appreciating the seriousness of contemporary jihād in the Islamic world, whether in West Africa or elsewhere, are profound.

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      THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONS AND THE ATLANTIC WORLD

      Eric Hobsbawm described the period between around 1775 and 1850 as the “age of revolution” that marked a turning point in modern history.1 For Hobsbawm and subsequent historians, revolution altered the course of world history, or at least the history of that part of the world centered on Europe and by extension the Americas and what has come to be known as the Atlantic world. The political transformations that undermined autocratic and aristocratic governance were matched by economic change, especially the intensification of industrialization and the emergence of the modern global economy. The powerful arguments supporting this view of historical change challenge scholars of Africa and the African diaspora to understand how people of African descent fitted into this period of history. Clearly, the St. Domingue revolution and many slave revolts that occurred during the age of revolutions can be understood to be part of the historical trend identified by Hobsbawm. Indeed, Eugene Genovese has argued as much, envisioning the St. Domingue revolution as a turning point in the history of resistance to slavery. According to Genovese, resistance before the St. Domingue uprising idealized a politically independent African past, while subsequently the enslaved population concentrated on overthrowing the system of slavery rather than on establishing enclaves of restoration of some reconstructed African past.2 As David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam have noted, the identification of the “age of revolutions” is one of “the most enduring period markers known to modern historians and has often been used by scholars invested in identifying pivotal moments in the emergence of a putatively modern world.”3

      What is not clear is how the African regions that bordered the Atlantic and the people who constituted the African diaspora in the Americas related to the global pattern that is identified as the age of revolutions in the Atlantic world. According to Joseph C. Miller, the age of revolutions was only “one phase in a longer cycle of militarization and commercialization in the greater Atlantic world that becomes visible when the dynamics of African, rather than Euro-American, history are used to define and calibrate the dimensions of transformation.”4 My purpose is to expand on Miller’s conception of the longue durée by focusing on jihād in West Africa as a means of establishing a clearer outline of the periods in African history. In this perspective, a large part of West Africa witnessed revolutionary changes at the same time as the age of revolutions in Europe and the Americas, which help establish how the homelands and regions of origin of the enslaved were affected by transatlantic 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

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