Books in the Western African Studies series

Between 1880 and 1920, Muslim Sufi orders became pillars of the colonial regimes and economies of Senegal and Mauritania.

While most studies of the slave trade focus on the volume of captives and on their ethnic origins, the question of how the Africans organized their familial and communal lives to resist and assail it has not received adequate attention.

West African Challenge to Empire examines the anticolonial war in the Volta and Bani region in 1915-16. It was the largest challenge that the French ever faced in their West African colonial empire, and one of the largest armed oppositions to colonialism anywhere in Africa.

By comparing the strategies of colonial administrators, slave-owners, and slaves across these two regions and throughout the nineteenth century, this book reveals the causes of the astounding success of slave owners, and also the factors that could, and in some cases did, lead to slave liberations.

Through an examination of metaphors that describe the trauma, loss, and suffering associated with the the transatlantic slave trade, Metaphor and the Slave Trade shows how the horrors of slavery are communicated from generation to generation and persist in West African discourse.

The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed some of the greatest gold mining migrations in history when dreams of bonanza lured thousands of prospectors and diggers to the far corners of the earth-including the Gold Coast of West Africa.El

Ouidah, an African town in Dahomey, now Benin, was the principal pre-colonial commercial centre of its region and this is the first detailed study of the town's history and its role in the Atlantic slave trade.