Slavery, Resistance, and Identity in Early Modern West Africa

Makhroufi Ousmane Traoré is Assistant Professor at Pomona College and an African scholar whose research primarily focuses on the history of the Trans-Saharan and Transatlantic slave trades. He was awarded the 2022 Andrew Mellon New Directions Fellowship. With this fellowship, Traoré endeavors to shine a light on the unheard voices of African Egyptologists with the publication of a textbook featuring African perspectives on Egyptology.

• Introduction; Part I. Between the Sahara and the Atlantic Ocean: 1. The ethnic-state of Gajaaga; 2. African slavery versus the slave trade(s); Part II. Atlantic Slavery, Kingship, and Worship of Nature: 3. Trans-Saharan and trans-Atlantic Gajaaga; 4. Matriarchy, ecology, and Atlantic slave trade; Part III. Gajaaga at the centre, the French Empire at the Edge: 5. Resisting the French empire; 6. Bridging empire and hinterland; Conclusion.

'The book will provoke new and interesting scholarly discussions and bring an important area of West Africa into broader historical conversations from which it has previously been missing. The work is highly original, both in the research presented and in the ideas it explores. It will be more than welcome to historians of precolonial Africa, the slave trade, Islamic Africa, French empire, and comparative slavery.' Rebecca Shumway, American Historical Review