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after 1854. The British blockade of the West African coast after 1808 may have shaken the coastal states of Africa, but it had virtually no impact in the interior other than to reinforce the goals of the Islamic jihād movement in isolating Africa from the Atlantic world of slavery without undermining slavery itself. In southern Africa the Great Trek of the Boers after 1834 was a response to British policies of abolishing slavery and efforts to govern an unwilling settler population, not conquest. Although Genovese recognized the importance of Muslim resistance to slavery and the Malês uprising in Bahia in 1835, he did not notice a similar uprising among the Muslim Yoruba in the British colony of Sierra Leone in 1831–32 at virtually the same time or the connections between Yoruba resistance in Cuba in the 1830s and events in West Africa arising from the jihād movement.²⁹

      The arguments in this book are directed at Eric Hobsbawm and Eugene Genovese largely in symbolic fashion, not because they neglected the scholarship of the jihād movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which they did, but because their enormous contributions to an understanding of the age of revolutions have achieved a level of orthodoxy that overshadows the wealth of scholarship on a missing component of that era. The scholarship on the age of revolutions has evolved greatly since Hobsbawm and Genovese published their pioneering works half a century ago. Among the many studies that have broadened the conception of the Atlantic world to include Africa, one can highlight the various biographical studies, such as James Sweet’s account of Domingoes Álvares, African healing, and the intellectual history of the Atlantic world and Walter Hawthorne’s examination of the links between the upper Guinea coast and northeastern Brazil, which serve as models for a transatlantic perspective.³⁰ Most especially, Jane Landers offers new insights on the shaping of an Atlantic world that attempts to integrate the West African backgrounds of people who were associated with the development of an Atlantic-wide “creole” society. As Landers has argued, biographical accounts provide “a prism through which to examine the active participation of Africans and their descendants in the age of Atlantic revolutions.”³¹ Landers demonstrates that such stories “make possible a more complex understanding of the traditional narratives and popular views of the Age of Revolutions, and demonstrate their active political and philosophical engagement in the most important events of their day.”³² Following the approach of these scholars, this study also relies heavily on biographical accounts.

      The historiography of slavery during the age of revolutions has recognized influences emanating from Africa in shaping slave society in the Americas, although this was not a concern of Hobsbawm, whose age of revolutions focused on social and economic change in Europe and the Americas in a way that had little room for influences originating in Africa. Yoruba influence in particular is a feature of the African diaspora that emerged in the nineteenth century, particularly in Cuba and Brazil, but also in Sierra Leone and Trinidad because of the extension of British abolitionist policies to those states. Although Genovese’s insight into the importance of St. Domingue as a turning point from rebellion as a form of resistance to one of revolution fits neatly into Hobsbawm’s paradigm, Genovese’s understanding of African influences was seriously flawed. There can be no argument about the importance of both scholars in understanding revolutionary change or the importance of St. Domingue in that process, but their contributions ignored the Atlantic world of Africa.³³ Despite the limitations that can be identified, both Hobsbawm and Genovese can be credited with influencing the study of slave resistance as a part of the age of revolutions, and here my intention is to place jihād in West Africa in this context.

      My aim, therefore, is to extend the discussion of the age of revolutions beyond Hobsbawm’s identification of a twofold industrial and political transformation and Genovese’s recognition of the St. Domingue uprising as a turning point from rebellion to revolution to ask how Africa fitted into their paradigms. The consolidation of a field of research that focuses on the Atlantic, especially the black Atlantic, has neglected issues of how the regions of Africa that interacted with the Atlantic world helped shape developments. Although we recognize the development of ethnic-based “nations” in the Americas and distinguish between African-born populations and creole/mulatto/mestizo societies that variously emerged in Brazil, the Caribbean, mainland Hispanic America, and North America, there has been a neglect of how the processes of change that were unleashed by the expansion of slavery in the Americas altered the course of history in Africa. The challenge of this book goes beyond Hobsbawm and Genovese to address the field of Atlantic studies. My intention is to elaborate on the contributions of Paul Gilroy, Ira Berlin, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Jane Landers, and others in understanding how the emergence of a “black Atlantic” was shaped by influences from the deep African interior.³⁴ Similarly, a transnational and global perspective suggests modifications of the approach of Bernard Bailyn and David Brion Davis in examining European and European settler control of the Atlantic world.³⁵ Although scholars studying Atlantic history recognize that the overwhelming number of people who crossed the Atlantic before the middle of the nineteenth century came from Africa, not Europe, and that this demography had a significant impact, especially as a contributing factor in slave resistance, sense of community, and commercial interaction, the connection with historical developments in Africa deserves fuller attention. A focus on the black Atlantic has to address why parts of Africa, at least Muslim areas, were able to retain a degree of autonomy.

      Central to the argument of this book and my dialogue with Hobsbawm, Genovese, and other scholars who analyze the age of revolutions without reference to Islamic West Africa is that the age of jihād has been largely overlooked. I suggest that locating jihād in the interpretation of the age of revolutions and the Atlantic world challenges our understanding of the modern era and provides a corrective that parallels a recognition of Haiti’s place in that analysis. The jihād movement shaped the slave trade from the late eighteenth century through the nineteenth century and reveals the importance of Islam in explaining the supply of slaves, a crucial insight with profound implications for our understanding of the trade, the origins of Africans sent to the Americas, and ethnicity in the Americas. I maintain that a fuller understanding of the age of revolutions requires the application of historical methodology that seeks out sources and interpretations that can test conceptual hypotheses and intellectual insights. The main problem is that both Hobsbawm and Genovese, and much of the scholarship since they set the direction of research, shaped a model for the modern world that provides a European focus on the history of the Western world, despite the opposition of many scholars to such a Eurocentric perspective. The question to be addressed is whether it is possible to ignore Africa, in this case West Africa, in the reconstruction of the history of the Atlantic world during this period.

      Of course, the chronological framework of the age of revolutions shifts from scholar to scholar; Hobsbawm emphasized the years 1789–1848, while Wim Klooster begins the period earlier with “civil war” in the British Empire and the independence of the United States. The Age of Revolution of David Brion Davis begins in 1770 and ends in 1823. Jane Landers associates the age of revolutions with resistance to slavery from the second half of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century. Whether or not the era is considered to have begun in the 1770s and to have ended with the American Civil War of the 1860s depends on the focus of analysis, but the general idea of an “age of revolutions” has become Atlantic-wide in its orientation.³⁶ For Landers, the age of revolutions is more concerned with the international quest for liberty coming from slaves and free blacks than with nationalist discourse, and hence her analysis ends in 1850, while Manuel Barcia ends his study in 1844.³⁷ The jihād movement fits into this chronology regardless of whether the period is thought to begin in the 1770s or 1789 and end in 1848 or the 1860s. During this era virtually the whole of the interior of West Africa from Senegambia to Lake Chad came under the rule of jihād states that swept away the preexisting political structures, with quite significantly different results that help expand the concept of the Atlantic world to include West Africa.

       Perspectives on History

      What was common in West Africa was the Islamic context, not the identification as Hausa, Yoruba, Mandingo, Juula, Fulbe, and so on. I contend that ethnicity was an extension of political identity, and its meaning has to be deconstructed. Ethnic labeling was transferred to the Americas, often buttressed with identification with a common language, like Yoruba, Igbo, Kimbundu, or Kikongo.

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