In the West African Sahel, slavery has been both widespread and resilient. And yet this is not because slave labor was exploited by profit-maximizing capitalists. In the Sahel, coercing workers made little economic sense, as there were neither cash crops nor large profits to be made by either private or public employers. So what was slavery all about and why did it endure into the present day in spite of multiple legal abolitions? This session considers how, in a context where coercion was determined by considerations different from profit maximization, wage labor never developed; forced labor was hard to justify in economic terms and therefore largely ineffective; and slavery remained viable not in connection to agricultural commercialization, but because it increased safety in the face of environmental adversity. It invites participants to reflect on how studying slavery in the Sahel might help us understand slavery in African and global history.
Benedetta Rossi is Professor of History at University College London. She is the author of From Slavery to Aid (CUP, 2015) and the editor of Reconfiguring Slavery: West African Trajectories (LUP, 2009, 2nd ed. 2016) and Les Mondes de l’Esclavage: Une Histoire Comparée (Seuil, 2021, with P. Ismard and C. Vidal). She guest-edited the special issues "Developmentalism, Labor, and the Slow Death of Slavery in Twentieth-Century Africa", ILWCH 92 (2017) and "Slavery and Marriage in African Societies", Slavery & Abolition 43, no. 2 (2022, with J. Quirk). She is primary investigator of the ERC Advanced grant African Abolitionism (AFRAB), 2020-25.
The workshop is open to all members of the BCDSS, including Ph.D. candidates and M.A. students.
This workshop series is organised by the Research Group "The Concept of Slavery in African History".
Mary Afolabi
Boluwatife Akinro
Ricardo Márquez García
Jutta Wimmler
Lukas Wissel