Rossi, Benedetta;
(2023)
Slavery in Francophone West Africa.
In: Pargas, Damian A and Schiel, Juliane, (eds.)
The Palgrave Handbook of Global Slavery.
(pp. 583-604).
Palgrave Macmillan: Cham, Switzerland.
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Abstract
Multiple forms of labor coercion were common in West Africa in the first half of the twentieth century. This chapter focuses on two of them: one, based on interior slavery, was rooted in the longue durée of regional history. The other, colonial forced labor, was exogenous and introduced by European colonialists between the mid-nineteenth and the early twentieth century. In Tahoua, the region of today’s Republic of Niger that this chapter focuses on, these two forms of coerced labor co-existed. In 1905 France abolished indigenous slavery in its recently acquired African territories and concurrently introduced a regime of compulsory labor for the building and maintenance of colonial infrastructure. In spite of French legal abolition, indigenous slavery did not die out, but started being contested and resisted more effectively by those who had been enslaved. Those formerly enslaved to local slaveowners and their descendants were also the first to be forcibly recruited to carry out construction work on colonial worksites. These two regimes of coerced labor, with different ideological origins, became intertwined and underwent substantial changes throughout the twentieth century. Their legacies have continued influencing labor relations and forms of personal dependence into the present day.
| Type: | Book chapter |
|---|---|
| Title: | Slavery in Francophone West Africa |
| ISBN-13: | 978-3-031-13259-9 |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1007/978-3-031-13260-5_33 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13260-5_33 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. |
| UCL classification: | UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of History UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10145677 |
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