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The West African, or Central, Sahel is a region of Africa for which there exists a relatively rich indigenous documentary regime. For pre-colonial Africa, this is the exception and not the rule. It allows researchers of this region to examine a plurality of local voices and perspectives transmitted in Hausa, Kanuri, Arabic, or Tamashek. In the Nineteenth Century the region included a range of polities characterised by a diversity of forms of political organisation, such as the pre-jihad Hausa city states, the Sultanates of Borno and Wandala near Lake Chad, the Tuareg lineage-based confederations gravitating around the Sultanate of Agadez in the Sahara, the highly stratified Fulani societies in their settled and nomadic forms and, after the jihad of Sheikh Usman dan Fodiyo, the Sokoto Caliphate, which was the largest Islamic sultanate in 19th C West Africa. Each week students will be asked to come to the seminar having read carefully at least one primary source and one (recommended) secondary reading connected to the primary source. They will be encouraged to read beyond the two required weekly readings in preparation for seminar discussions that will prioritise the critical interpretation of sources in African languages (and Arabic) available in translation.ÌýÌý

The module aims to go beyond a history of rulers and intellectual elites and inquire into the historical experience of common people and persons of slave status. The first session will introduce the main conceptual and methodological challenges, and the second session will introduce students to the environment and its influence on economic and political relations. The following seminars will focus on major social institutions and their transformations, with weekly topics looking at social hierarchies, religious reformism, trade and mobility, labour and slavery, gender, and European colonial occupation. Seminars will consider the dynamics that took place in relation to specific institutions in the West African Sahel in the Nineteenth Century from the perspective of the authors of the sources examined. The intellectual and political projects of these authors will be discussed. Local reflections on encounters with Europeans in the middle-to-late nineteenth century will be the focus of the last session. There will be scope to consider how rising European imperialism was experienced by different groups in this region. The module’s main aim is to re-centre research on the West African Sahel around local ideas, processes, and institutions and avoid a Eurocentric approach that sees African dynamics as but an appendix to the history of Europe’s exploration and empire-building.ÌýÌýÌý