Migration History and Historiography (2024)

1. Tattersall, Ian, “Out of Africa Again . . . and Again?” in Evolution: A Scientific American Reader, ed. Scientific American (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 291–300, here 298–299. Originally published in April 1997

2. See Susan C. Antón and Carl C. Swisher, “Early Dispersals of hom*o from Africa,” Annual Review of Anthropology 33 (2004): 271–296. For a more general discussion, see Roger Blench, Archaeology, Language, and the African Past (Lanham, MD: Altamira Press 2006), 1.

3. G. Camps, “Beginning of Pastoralism and Cultivation in North-West Africa and the Sahara: Origins of the Berbers,” in Cambridge History of Africa, Vol. 1: From the Earliest Times to c. 500 BC, ed. J. Desmond Clark (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), 548–623, here 570.

4. Ralph Austen, Trans-Saharan Africa in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 7.

5. Pierre De Maret, “Archaeologies of the Bantu Expansion,” in Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology, ed. Peter Mitchell and Paul Lane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 629. The findings of the lexicostatical study are presented in Y. Bastin, A. Coupez, and M. Mann, Continuity and Divergence in the Bantu Languages: Perspectives from a Lexicostatistic Study (Tervuren: Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale, 1999).

6. Jan Vansina, “New Linguistic Evidence and the ‘Bantu Expansion’,” The Journal of African History 36, no. 2 (1995): 173–195, here 190–195.

7. For a critical summary of the state of this debate in 1979 and 2010, see John Sutton, “Towards a Less Orthodox History of Hausaland,” The Journal of African History 20, no. 2 (1979): 179–201; and John Sutton, “Hausa as a Process in Time and Space,” in Being and Becoming Hausa: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Anne Haour and Benedetta Rossi (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2010), 279–298.

8. Sonja Magnavita and Carlos Magnavita, “All that Glitters Is not Gold: Facing the Myths of Ancient Trade between North and Sub-Saharan Africa,” in Landscapes, Sources, and Intellectual Projects of the West African Past, ed. Toby Green and Benedetta Rossi (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2018).

9. Austen, Trans-Saharan Africa, 15.

10. William Hugh Clifford Frend, “The Christian Period in Mediterranean Africa, c. AD 200 to 700,” in The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 2: From c. 500 BC to 1050, ed. John fa*ge, and Roland Oliver (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 410–489. The main study remains Stephan Gsell, Histoire ancienne de l’Afrique du Nord. 8 vols. (Paris, FR: Hachette, 1913–1928).

11. Jonathan Conant, “Europe and the African Cult of Saints, Circa 350–900: An Essay in Mediterranean Communications,” Speculum 85, no. 1 (2010): 1–46.

12. Stacey Graham, The Dissemination of North African Christian and Intellectual Culture in Late Antiquity (PhD diss., University of California at Los Angeles, 2005), 1.

13. Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce AD 300–900 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 252.

14. Ghislane Lydon, On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 54–57.

15. Ann McDougall, “Salt, Saharans, and the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade: Nineteenth Century Developments,” in The Human Commodity: Perspectives on the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade, ed. Elizabeth Savage (London: Frank Cass, 1992), 61–88.

16. Robin Law, “The Garamantes and Trans-Saharan Enterprise in Classical Times,” Journal of African History 8 (1967): 181–200, here184.

17. Lydon, On Trans-Saharan Trails, 57; Timothy Garrard, “Myth and Metrology: The Early Trans-Saharan Gold Trade,” Journal of African History 23 (1982): 443–461.

18. A geniza is a room, usually connected to synagogues in the Middle East, where documents that may contain the name of God are deposited to be protected from desecration.

19. Shlomo Dev Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, 6 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967–1993).

20. John Hunwick and Eve Trout-Powell, eds., The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2002).

21. Ralph Austen, “The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade: A Tentative Census,” in The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, ed. Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn, 23–76 (New York: Academic Press, 1979a); and Ralph Austen, “The Islamic Red Sea Slave Trade: An Effort at Quantification,” Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Ethiopian Studies (Chicago: 1979b), 443–467.

22. Austen, Trans-Saharan Africa in World History, 32.

23. Behnaz Mirzai, Ismael Musah Montana, and Paul Lovejoy, eds., Slavery, Islam, and Diaspora (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2009).

24. Bruce Hall, A History of Race in Muslim West Africa (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

25. Camille Lefebvre, “Un esclave a vu le monde: Se déplacer en tant qu’esclave au Soudan central (XIXe siècle),” Dossiê África: Mobilidades, trajetórias e travessias na história do continente africano dirigé par Marina Berthet, Locus, Revista de História 35, no. 2 (2012): 105–143.

26. Bruce Hall, “How Slaves Used Islam: The Letters of Enslaved Muslim Commercial Agents in the Nineteenth Century Niger Bend and Central Sahara,” Journal of African History 52 (2011): 279–297.

27. Alexandre Popovic, The Revolt of African Slaves in Iraq in the Third/Ninth Century (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1999).

28. Theodor Noldeke, Sketches from Eastern History, trans. John Southerland Black (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1892), 146–175; and Raymond W. Beachey, The Slave Trade of Eastern Africa (London: Rex Collings, 1976), 4.

29. Richard Allen, European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015), 15.

30. Allen, European Slave Trading, 24.

31. David Eltis, “A Brief Overview of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade” (2007), Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.

32. Eltis, “A Brief Overview.”

33. Paul Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (2nd ed.; Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), especially 189–190, 283–289.

34. Robert Harms, Bernard Freamon, and David Blight, eds., Indian Ocean Slavery in the Age of Abolition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 1, footnote 3: “Figures from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, show that approximately 50,000 slaves were taken from this region during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, but over 225,000 were carried off in the quarter century between 1826 and 1850.”

35. Jane Hooper and David Eltis, “The Indian Ocean in Transatlantic Slavery,” Slavery & Abolition 34, no. 3 (2013): 353–375, here 355–356.

36. See Julian Cobbing, “The Mfecane as Alibi: Thoughts on Dithakong and Mbolompo,” The Journal of African History 29, no. 3 (1988): 487–519; and John Wright, “Political Mythology and the Making of Natal’s Mfecane,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 23 (1989): 272–291.

37. Norman Etherington, “The Great Trek in Relation to the Mfecane: A Reassessment,” South African Historical Journal 21, no. 1 (1991): 3–21.

38. Norman Etherington, The Great Treks: The Transformation of Southern Africa 1815–1854 (New York: Pearson Education Limited, 2001), 344.

39. In the mid-19th century, South Africa hosted two British colonies (Cape Colony and Natal), two Boer Republics (Transvaal and Orange Free State), and several independent African chiefdoms, the largest of which were the Zulu and Basuto kingdoms.

40. For detailed accounts of these trajectories, see the travel diaries of James L. Sims, George L. Seymour, and Benjamin J. K. Anderson, who explored the territory that is now Liberia and Guinea between 1858 and 1874; James Fairhead, Tim Geysbeek, Svend E. Holsoe, and Melissa Leach, eds., African-American Exploration in West Africa: Four Nineteenth-Century Diaries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003).

41. Some of the main cash crops were kola in Asante, palm products along the southern coast of West Africa, cotton in Nigeria and Uganda, peanuts in Northern Nigeria and Senegambia, and cocoa in Western Nigeria and the Gold Coast.

42. In relation to Senegambian migrations Manchuelle develops the following reasoning: “Why, given the wide availability of slaves in the Western Sudan at the time, did Gambian agricultural development take place with the help of free labour migrants? A first answer to this question is that navetane arrangements were advantageous from the point of view of employer and laborer alike. Navetanes could reap the full profit of cash crop agriculture by obtaining the use of a plot on which to grow their own crops instead of being paid a flat daily sum as wage laborers. As for employers, the system allowed them to obtain laborers without having to disburse anything, as they would have if they had bought slaves or hired wage laborers. Employers simply had to provide land, and all sources concur that there was generally an overabundance of land in nineteenth century Gambia. Another possible answer is that slaves were needed as year-round laborers, while navetanes were needed as seasonal laborers.” Francois Manchuelle, Willing Migrants (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997), 56

43. For the case of the Sokoto Caliphate, see Camille Lefebvre, Frontières de sable, frontières de papier: Histoire de territoires et de frontières, du jihad de Sokoto à la colonisation française du Niger, XIXe-XXe siècles (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2015), chps. 2, 3, and 4.

44. Paul Lovejoy and Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, eds., The Workers of African Trade (Beverly Hills: SAGE, 1985).

45. Stephen Rockel, “‘A Nation of Porters’: The Nyamwezi and the Labour Market in Nineteenth Century Tanzania,” The Journal of African History 41, no. 2 (2000): 173–195.

46. Thadeus Sunsori, Labor Migration and Rural Change in Early Colonial Tanzania (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002).

47. Thadeus Sunsori, “‘Dispersing the Fields’: Railway Labor and Rural Change in Early Colonial Tanzania,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 32, no. 3 (1998): 558–583.

48. Martin Klein and Richard Roberts, “The Banamba Slave Exodus of 1905 and the Decline of Slavery in the Western Sudan,” Journal of African History 21 (1980): 375–394; and Martin Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), chps. 10 and 12.

49. Martin Klein, “Slave Descent and Social Status in Sahara and Sudan,” in Reconfiguring Slavery: West African Trajectories, ed. Benedetta Rossi (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009), 29. For statistical data on the movements of ex-slaves in different regions of French West Africa, see Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule, 170–174.

50. Paul Lovejoy and Jan Hogendorn, Slow Death for Slavery: The Course of Abolition in Northern Nigeria, 1897–1936 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 61.

51. Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule, 140.

52. Benedetta Rossi, “Migration and Emancipation in West Africa’s Labour History: The Missing Links,” Slavery & Abolition 35.1 (2013), 23–46; François Manchuelle, “Slavery, Emancipation and Labour Migration in West Africa: The case of the Soninke,” Journal of African History 30 (1989): 89–106; Florence Boyer, “L’esclavage chez les touareg de Bankilaré au miroir des migrations circulaires,” Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines 45 (2005): 771–804; Marie Rodet, Les migrantes ignorées du Haut-Sénégal, 1900–1946 (Paris: Karthala, 2009); and Lotte Pelckmans, Travelling Hierarchies: Roads In and Out of Slave Status in a Central Malian Fulbe Network (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2011).

53. Bill Freund, Capital and Labour in the Nigerian Tin Mines (Harlow, UK: Longman, 1981), 51–52.

54. Pelckmans, Travelling Hierarchies; and Jean Schmitz, “Islamic Patronage and Republican Emancipation: The Slaves of the Almaami in the Senegal River Valley,” in Reconfiguring Slavery: West African Trajectories, ed. Benedetta Rossi (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009), 85–115.

55. Benedetta Rossi, From Slavery to Aid: Politics, Labour and Ecology in the Nigerien Sahel, 1800–2000 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 192–200.

56. Paolo Gaibazzi, “The Rank Effect: Post-Emancipation Immobility in a Soninke Village,” Journal of African History 53, no. 2 (2012): 215–234.

57. Carola Lentz, Land, Mobility, and Belonging in West Africa: Natives and Strangers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 25.

58. Francois Manchuelle, “Slavery, Emancipation, and Labour Migration in West Africa: The Case of the Soninke,” Journal of African History 30 (1989): 89–106, here 92; and Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Africa: Endurance and Change South of the Sahara (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 216.

59. Kenneth Swindell, “Farmers, Traders, and Labourers: Dry Season Migration from North-West Nigeria 1900–33,” Africa 54 (1984): 17.

60. Samir Amin, “Migrations in Contemporary Africa: A Retrospective View,” in The Migration Experience in Africa, ed. Jonathan Baker and Akin Tade (Uppsala, Sweden: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1995), 31.

61. Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), see especially pp. 110–170. See also Monica van Beusekom and Dorothy Hodgson’s introduction to a special issue of the Journal of African History, “Lessons Learned? Development Experiences in the Late Colonial Period,” The Journal of African History 41, no. 1 (2000): 29–33.

62. The full text of the ILO’s Co39 – Forced Labour Convention, 1930 (No. 29) can be found at the International Labour Organization website. Co29 was adopted by the ILO on June 28, 1930 and ratified by Britain on June 3, 1931, Italy on June 18, 1934, France on June 24, 1937, and Portugal on June 26, 1956. For a discussion of the circ*mstances in which the Convention was developed, see Suzanne Miers, Slavery in the Twentieth Century: The Evolution of a Global Problem (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2003), 134–151.

63. In addition to positive actions to force groups to move in the name of development, development discourse displayed a negative attitude toward autonomous migration. See for example Oliver Bakewell, “‘Keeping Them in Their Place’: the Ambivalent Relationship between Development and Migration In Africa,” Third World Quarterly 29, no. 7 (2008): 1341–1358.

64. Monica van Beusekom, Negotiating Development: African Farmers and Colonial Experts at the Office du Niger, 1920–1960 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002). See also Doug Porter, Bryant Allen, and Gaye Thompson, Development in Practice: Paved with Good Intentions (London: Routledge, 1991).

65. Allen Isaacman and Barbara Isaacman, Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development: Cahora Bassa and Its Legacies in Mozambique, 1965–2007 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013).

66. Urbano, Annalisa, “A ‘Grandiose Future for Italian Somalia’: Colonial Developmentalist Discourse, Agricultural Planning, and Forced Labor (1900–1940),” International Labor and Working-Class History 92 (2017): 69–88.

67. Loffman, Reuben, “Belgian Rule and Its Afterlives: Colonialism, Developmentalism, and Mobutism in the Tanganyika District, Southeastern DR-Congo, 1885–1985,” International Labor and Working-Class History 92 (2017): 47–68.

68. Wiemers, Alice, “‘It Is All He Can Do to Cope with the Roads in His Own District’: Labor, Community, and Development in Northern Ghana, 1919–1936,” International Labor and Working-Class History 92 (2017): 89–113.

69. Joel Quirk and Darshan Vigneswaran, eds., Mobility Makes States: Migration and Power in Africa (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 19–24.

70. Whyte, Christine, “A State of Underdevelopment: Sovereignty, Nation-Building, and Labor in Liberia 1898–1961,” International Labor and Working-Class History 92 (2017): 24–46.

71. John Weeks, “Wage Policy and the Colonial Legacy: A Comparative Study,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 9, no. 3 (1971), 361–387, here 367–369.

72. Keith Shear, “At War with the Pass Laws? Reform and the Policing of White Supremacy in 1940s South Africa,” The Historical Journal 56, no. 1 (2013): 205–229, here 207.

73. Michael Savage, “The Imposition of Pass Laws on the African Population in South Africa, 1916–1984,” African Affairs 85 (1986): 185–205, here 186.

74. Freddy Foks, “From Dual Economy to Dual Sector; From the Dual Mandate to Development,” A History of Social Anthropology (blog).

75. Hlya Myint, “The ‘Classical’ Theory of International Trade and the Underdeveloped countries.” Economy Journal 68 (1958): 317–337; and H. Myint, The Economics of the Developing Countries (London: Hutchinson, 1973), 29–40. For a critical discussion, see Jan Hogendorn, “The Vent for Surplus Model and African Cash Agriculture to 1914,” Savanna 5, no. 1 (1976): 15–28.

76. Gareth Austin, “Reciprocal Comparison and African History: Tackling Conceptual Eurocentrism in the Study of Africa’s Economic Past,” African Studies Review 50, no. 3 (2007): 1–28, here 6.

77. Elliot Berg, “The Economics of the Migrant Labour System,” in Urbanization and Migration in West Africa, ed. Hilda Kuper (Berkeley: California University Press, 1965), 174.

78. Harold Wolpe, “Capitalism and Cheap Labour-Power in South Africa: From Segregation to Apartheid 1,” Economy and Society 1, no. 4 (1974): 425–456; and Claude Meillassoux, Femmes, greniers et capitaux (Paris: Maspero, 1975).

79. Dennis Cordell, Joel Gregory, and Victor Piche´, “Migration in West Africa: Past and Present,” in Hoe and Wage: A Social History of a Circular Migration System in West Africa, ed. Dennis Cordell, Joel Gregory, and Victor Piche´ (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 1–44, here 17–20; and Richard Roberts, “The Peculiarities of African Labour and Working-Class History,” Labour/Le Travailleur 8, no. 9 (1981): 317–318.

80. Bill Freund, The African Worker (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 16; Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society, see in particular 383–386; and Federick Cooper, “Africa and the World Economy,” African Studies Review 24, no. 2/3 (1981): 1–86, here 32–48. Keletso Atkins published a study of South African labor in Natal that privileged the perspective of workers themselves. Keletso Atkins, The Moon Is Dead! Give Us Our Money! The Cultural Origins of an African Work Ethic, Natal, South Africa, 1843–1900 (London: James Curry, 1993).

81. James Ferguson, Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 11. See also Jeremy Seekings, Beyond “Fluidity”: Kinship and Households as Social Projects (Working Paper no. 237, Center for Social Science Research, University of Cape Town, 2008).

82. For example, Article 1 of the treaty adopted in Lagos on May 28, 1975, by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) states that “subject to the provisions governing police regulations and public safety, as well as the prescriptions of the sanitary rules, nationals of Member States are free to enter the territory of any of the Members, to travel, to stay, and to leave by simply showing a valid national passport, with no other formality, such as obtaining an entry or exit visa.” Hamidou Ba and Abdoulaye Fall. 2006. “Legislation on Migrant Workers in West Africa, International Labour Office (International Migration Working Paper No. 80, 2006), 9.

83. Keith Hart, 1973, “Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana,” Journal of Modern African Studies 2, no. 1 (1973): 61–89. See also Hart’s retrospective reflections in Keith Hart, “Market and State after the Cold War: The Informal Economy Reconsidered,” in Contesting Markets, ed. Roy Dilley (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), 214–226, here 217. See also Basudeb Guha-Khasnobis, Ravi Kanbur, and Elinor Ostrom, “Beyond Formality and Informality,” in Linking the Formal and the Informal Economy: Concepts and Policies, ed. Basudeb Guha-Khasnobis, Ravi Kanbur, and Elinor Ostrom, 1–18 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

84. Beatrice Hibou, L’Afrique est-elle protectionniste? Les chemins buissonniers de la libéralisation extérieure (Paris: Karthala, 1996); and Beatrice Hibou, ed., La privatisation des états (Paris: Karthala, 1999).

85. For a discussion of networks in the context of informalization see Kate Meagher, Identity Economics: Social Networks and the Informal Economy in Nigeria (Woodbridge, UK: James Currey, 2010); see also Emmanuel Gregoire, “Reseaux et Espaces Economiques Transetatiques,” Reunion du Groupe d’Orientation des Politiques, Paris, Octobre 29–31, 2003 (Paris: Sahel and West Africa Club–OECD, 2003). See Benedetta Rossi, “Tubali’s Trip: Rethinking Informality in the Study of West African Labour Migrations,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 48, no. 1 (2014): 77–100, for a more critical take on networks.

86. Sally Falk Moore, “Law and Social Change: The Semi-Autonomous Social Field as an Appropriate Subject of Study,” Law and Society Review 7 (1973): 719–746.

87. Laurence Marfaing, “Quelles mobilités pour quelles ressources?” Canadian Journal of African Studies 48, no. 1 (2014): 41–57, here 49.

88. Hammar, Amanda, JoAnn McGregor, and Loren Landau. “Introduction: Displacing Zimbabwe: Crisis and Construction in Southern Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 36, no. 2 (2010): 263–283, here 271.

89. Bolt, Maxim, Zimbabwe’s Migrants and South Africa’s Border Farms: The Roots of Impermanence (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

90. Ruth Hall, “Hierarchies, Violence, Gender: Narratives from Zimbabwean Migrants on South African Farms,” in In the Shadow of a Conflict: Crisis in Zimbabwe and Its Effects in Mozambique, South Africa, and Zambia, ed. Bill Derman and Randi Kaarhus (Harare, Zimbabwe: Waver Press, 2012).

91. James McDougall and Judith Scheele, eds., Saharan Frontiers: Space and Mobility in Northwest Africa (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2012).

92. See for example Zoë Groves “Transnational Networks and Regional Solidarity: The Case of the Central African Federation, 1953–1963,” African Studies 72, no. 2 (2013): 155–175.

93. Leslie Fesenmyer, “Transnational Families: Toward Emotion,” in Migration: The COMPAS Anthology, ed. Michael Keith and Bridget Anderson (Oxford: COMPAS, 2014). On the challenges that the expectation of intense collaboration generates for individual migrants, see Leslie Fesenmyer, “‘Assistance but Not Support’: Pentecostalism and the Reconfiguring of Relatedness between Kenya and the United Kingdom,” in Affective Circuits: African Migrations to Europe and the Pursuit of Social Regeneration, ed. Jennifer Coles and Christian Groes-Green (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 125–145.

94. “What mediates between a passive network and action is common threat. Once these atomized individuals are confronted by a threat to their gains, their passive network spontaneously turns into an active network and collective action,” Asef Bayat, “Uncivil Society: The Politics of the ‘Informal People’,” Third World Quarterly 18, no. 1(1997): 53–72, here 64.

95. Kate Meagher, “The Invasion of The Opportunity Snatchers: The Rural-Urban Interface in Northern Nigeria,” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 19, no. 1 (2001): 39–54.

96. Tom Brass, Labor Regime Change in the Twenty-First Century: Unfreedom, Capitalism, and Primitive Accumulation (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2013), 31.

97. Elisabeth McMahon, “Trafficking and Reenslavement: The Social Vulnerability of Women and Children in Nineteenth Century East Africa,” in Trafficking in Slavery’s Wake: Law and the Experience of Women and Children in Africa, ed. Benjamin Lawrance and Richard Roberts (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012), 29–44.

98. UNODC, “Organized Crime and Irregular Migraton from Africa to Europe” 2006, p. 19, and South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA) both cited in Benjamin Lawrance and Richard Roberts, eds., Trafficking in Slavery’s Wake: Law and the Experience of African Women and Children (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press 2012), 2.

99. Jonathan Baker, Refugee and Labour Movements in Sub-Saharan Africa (working paper no. 2, Studies on Emergencies and Disaster Relief, Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1995).

100. Simon McMahon and Nando Sigona, “Navigating the Central Mediterranean in a Time of ‘Crisis’: Disentangling Migration Governance and Migrant Journeys,” Sociology 52, no. 3 (2018): 497–514, here 501.

101. Jørgen Carling, “Refugees Are Also Migrants: And All Migrants Matter,” Border Criminologies Blog, September 3, 2015.

102. McMahon and Sigona, “Navigating the Central Mediterranean,” 506–510.

103. Marfaing, “Quelles mobilités,” 49. See also Mehdi Lahlou, Les migrations irrégulières entre le Maghreb et l’Union Européenne: Evolutions Récentes, Institut Universitaire Européen (Florence : Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, 2005).

104. Achille Mbembe as cited in African development Bank Group, “Achille Mbembe Makes a Strong Case for African Integration through Open Borders.” African Development Bank Group, February 10, 2012.

105. Law, “The Garamantes and Trans-Saharan Enterprise”; McCormick, Origins of the European Economy; Conant, “Europe and the African Cult of Saints”; and Graham, The Dissemination of North African Christian and Intellectual Culture.

106. Edward A. Alpers, “The African Diaspora in the Northwestern Indian Ocean: Reconsideration of an Old Problem, New Directions for Research,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 17, no. 2 (1997): 62–81, here 62. For a recent critique of the dominant Afro-Atlantic model in African diaspora studies, see Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, “African Diasporas: Toward a Global History,” African Studies Review 53, no. 1 (2010): 1–19.

107. Behnaz Mirzai, Ismael Musah Montana, and Paul Lovejoy, eds., Slavery, Islam and Diaspora (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2009); Ana Lucia Araujo, Mariana Candido, and Paul Lovejoy, eds., Crossing Memories: Slavery and African Diaspora (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2011); Toby Green, ed., Brokers of Change: Atlantic Commerce and Cultures in Pre-Colonial Western Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2012); Linda Heywood and John Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Manuel Barcia-Paz, West African Warfare in Bahia and Cuba: Soldier Slaves in the Atlantic World, 1807–1844 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

108. For a broader discussion of these perspectives, see Frederick Cooper, “Africa and the World Economy,” African Studies Review 24, no. 2/3 (1981): 22.

109. Abner Cohen, Custom and Politics in Urban Africa: A Study of Hausa Migrants in Yoruba Towns (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1969), 191.

110. Immanuel Wallerstein, “Migration in West Africa: The Political Perspective,” in Urbanization and Migration, ed. Hilda Kuper, 155; see also A. Peace, “Industrial Protest in Nigeria,” in The Development of an African Working Class: Studies in Class Formation and Action, ed. Richard Sandbrook and Robin Cohen (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1975), 41.

111. Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Africa: Endurance and Change South of the Sahara (Berkeley: California University Press, 1988), 223.

112. Richard Roberts, “The Peculiarities of African Labour and Working-Class History,” Labour/Le Travailleur, 8/9 (1981): 317–318. See also Cooper, Decolonization and African Society, 273.

113. For a review of this debate, see Foster-Carter, A. “The Modes of Production Controversy,” New Left Review 1, no. 107 (1978): 47–77.

114. For a review of this debate, see Thérèse Gerold-Scheepers and Wim Van Binsberger “Marxist and Non-Marxist Approaches to Migration in Tropical Africa,” African Perspectives 1 (1978): 21–35.

115. Susan McIntosh, ed., Beyond Chiefdoms: Pathways to Complexity in Africa (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Timothy Insoll, The Archaeology of Islam (Cambridge, UK: Blackwell, 1999); Ann Stahl, ed., African Archaeology: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Blackwell, 2005); and David Philllipson, African Archaeology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and more recently Anne Haour, who has been coordinating a research project on medieval empires of the Niger Valley funded by the European Research Council’s FP7 programme, see Crossroads of Empires (blog).

116. Paulo Fernandes de Moraes Farias, Arabic Medieval Inscriptions from the Republic of Mali: Epigraphy, Chronicles, and Songhay-Tuareg History (Oxford: Fontes Historiae Africanae New Series, 2003).

117. James Webb, Desert Frontier: Ecological and Economic Change along the Western Sahel, 1600–1850 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995); George Brooks, Landlords and Strangers: Ecology, Society and Trade in Western Africa, 1000–1630 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993); George Brooks, Western Africa to 1860 AD: A Provisional Historical Schema Based on Climate Periods (Unpublished research paper, Bloomington: Indiana University, 1985); and Nick Brooks et al., “The Environment-Society Nexus in the Sahara from Prehistoric Times to the Present Day,” Journal of North African Studies 10, no. 3–4 (2005): 253–292.

118. Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition. A Study in Historical Methodology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965); Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); David Henige, The Chronology of Oral Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974); David Henige, Oral Historiography (London: Longman, 1982); David Henige, “Truths Yet Unborn? Oral Tradition as a Casualty Of Culture Contact,” The Journal of African History 23, no. 3 (1982): 395–412); Bogumil Jewsiewicki and David Newbury, eds., African Historiographies: What History for Which Africa? (London: SAGE, 1986), 91–104; and Toyin Falola and Christian Jennings, eds., Sources and Methods in African History: Spoken, Written, Unearthed (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2003).

119. These sources have been studied extensively by scholars such as Nehemia Levtzion, Tadeus Lewicki, J. F. P. Hopkins, John Hunwick, Paulo Fernando De Moraes Farias, Ghislaine Lydon, and Bruce Hall. A selection of these sources for the reconstruction of West African History has been critically translated and published by N. Levtzion and J. F. P. Hopkins, eds., Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History (Princeton, NJ: Maekus Wiener, 2000). Nehemia Levtzion and Jay Spaulding, Medieval West Africa (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2003). On the sub-Saharan African diaspora in the Islamic Mediterranean, see John Hunwick and Eve Troutt-Powell, eds., The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam. (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2002).

120. On Ajami, see for example Fallou Ngom, Muslims Beyond the Arab World: The Odyssey of Ajami and the Muridiyya (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). For European sources: Camille Lefebvre recently obtained a European Research Council grant that will allow her to research a broad range of scarcely known and under-exploited European non-jihadist sources for the 18th and 19th century history of the region.

121. See John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Formation of the Atlantic World, 1400–1680 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Toby Green, The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011); see also studies by Robin Law, alone and in collaboration with Suzanne Schwartz and Silke Strickrodt. Peter Mark, The Forgotten Diaspora: Jewish Communities in West Africa and the Making of the Atlantic World. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Goitein, A Mediterranean Society (Berkeley: University of California, 1971).

122. These two databases are discussed by Justin Roberts in an online review entitled “Slavery Counted, Slavery Defined, and Slavery Online,” Reviews in History.

123. Links to both databases are accessible via the website of the International Migration Institute. University of Oxford.

124. Morten Jerven, Poor Numbers: How We Are Misled by African Development Statistics and What to Do about It (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).

125. Zoë Groves, “People and Places: Land, Migration And Political Culture in Zimbabwe,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 50, no. 2 (2012): 339–356, here 355.

126. Nicki Kindersley, “Southern Sudanese Narratives of Displacement and the Ambiguity of ‘Voice’,” History in Africa 42 (2015): 203–237.

127. Florence Boyer, “Movement and Migration: A New Understanding,” Cahiers de Géographie du Québec 54, no. 153(2010): 445–458; Armelle Choplin and Jerome Lombard, “On West African Roads: Everyday Mobility and Exchanges between Mauritania, Senegal, and Mali,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 48, no. 1 (2014): 59–75; and Julien Brachet, Armelle Choplin, and Olivier Pliez, “Observar y Describir el Sujeto Migrante en Movimiento,” Herodote 142 (2011): 163–182.