Colleen E. Kriger

Textile Production and Gender in the Sokoto Caliphate

Men and women, trained in the occupations of spinner, weaver, dyer, tailor and embroiderer, manufactured the renowned textile products of the Sokoto Caliphate, a nineteenth-century state in the central Sudan region of West Africa. The numerical distributions of men and women within these occupations were uneven, but not in accordance with the pattern described most frequently in the literature. Offered here is another, more detailed view of textile production. Women were not simply spinners but were also weavers and dyers. Uneven, too, were the geographical distributions of men and women workers. Men skilled in textile manufacturing were widely disseminated throughout the caliphate, as were women spinners; women skilled at weaving and dyeing, however, were concentrated mainly in the southern emirates of Nupe and Ilorin. Similarly, male entrepreneurs organized large-scale textile manufacturing enterprises in the north-central portion of the caliphate while enterprises created by women were located to the south. New sources, the textile products of the caliphate, along with other contemporary evidence, reveal that womens work was more varied, more prominent, more highly skilled and more organized than previously thought. Comparative analyses along gender lines show that mens work and womens work were similar in the degree of training required and the levels of skill achieved. Labor, especially skilled labor, was critical to textile production if the caliphate was to maintain its external markets. But there were substantial differences in the degree to which men and women could mobilize and organize labor. A variety of social and political factors in caliphate society combined to assist men and hinder women in the organization and management of textile manufacturing.

Afro-European trade in the Atlantic world: the western Slave Coast c1550-c1885

Berlin devotes the conclusion more narrowly to the Civil War years, with emphases on slaves running away to Union lines and black soldiering. The Long Emancipation is not a traditional monograph but a think-piece that synthesizes existing scholarship. In the book’s coverage, breadth trumps depth. Berlin paints with broad strokes, offering a limited number of examples and no more than a few pages on any one topic. His book does not include the sort of comprehensive, state-by-state detail that would make it useful as a quick reference. Where it succeeds instead is in re-conceptualizing emancipation as an extended process rather than as a solitary event. Still, one may question why historians ought to interpret emancipation as a single long process rather than as a series of multiple emancipations – plural – with several formal, lawful examples clustered around the American Revolution and then again in the 1860s, the latter including the abolition of slavery in Washington, D.C., the Emancipation Proclamation, and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. Before the Civil War, whenever slaves fled to freedom, purchased themselves, filed successful freedom suits, or were liberated by acts of manumission, they benefited individually and were not laboring consciously to dismantle the system of slavery as a whole. These instances, then, might also better be thought of as countless, discrete mini-emancipations rather than as part of one large process, as Berlin contends. Brief mentions of Saint Domingue excepted, Berlin limits his scope to the demise of slavery within the United States. The choice not to venture much beyond U.S. borders to place abolition within a global or comparative context has consequences for his conclusions. Adopting a more expansive transnational perspective complicates, for example, his argument that ‘[v]iolence was inherent in the process’ of emancipation (11). Because the violent overthrow of slavery was neither universal nor even normative across the globe, the reader is left to wonder why it took a catastrophic war that cost three-quarters of a million lives to destroy slavery in the U.S. South, while other places eradicated the institution without bloodshed. The Long Emancipation is a volume of compact dimensions whose 175 pages of text flow smoothly and read quickly. Experts in the fields of slavery and abolition will find the book’s content familiar, but for the general public, undergraduates, or graduate students preparing for comprehensive exams, it provides a valuable overview of U.S. emancipation in the longue durée.

Brokers of Change: Atlantic Commerce and Cultures in Pre-Colonial Western Africa ed. by Toby Green, and: Black Ranching Frontiers: African Cattle Herders of the Atlantic World, 1500–1900 by Andrew Sluyter (review)

place of hu man be ings within it. This they could have ac com plished with out extending the length of their text book by re duc ing their cover age of his tor i cal pat terns over the last five cen tu ries, since they have han dled those five hun dred years in large mea sure with more con ventional nar ra tives that of ten do not seem to fit the Big History ap proach they have tried to de velop and that pro vide a sig nif i cant con trast to their treat ment of top ics such as hominine evo lu tion from 8 mil lion to 200,000 years ago. Yet Chris tian, Brown, and Ben ja min be come truly in no va tive when they use re cent his tor i cal trends to spec u late about fu ture pos si bil i ties, first dur ing the next cen tu ry, then over the next several mil len nia, and fi nally over the next five bil lion years when our spe cies will surely cease to ex ist. It is a risky en ter prise, but one that lends itself to fas ci nat ing spec u la tion and moves them closer to a consid er ation of larger ques tions about mean ing and value that big his to rians will ul ti mately be com pelled to con front. john a. mears Southern Methodist University

The Fante and the Transatlantic slave trade

of two major ransoming orders (52), besides neglecting an enormous literature about secular efforts at redemption. At least once, such oversight has the effect of crediting an American – Thomas Jefferson – with a longstanding European idea: the alliance of neutral Christian powers to combat North African corsairs (47). Meanwhile, the captivity narratives and travel accounts from which Americans cribbed were hardly English originals. They were themselves composites with passages translated and transposed over centuries. As Peskin’s overall framework readily acknowledges but his examples do not fully demonstrate, US–North African relations took place within a global context. This Anglo-American emphasis, however, does not compromise the book’s core strength. Captives and Countrymen makes an important contribution not just to American historiography, but to the study of ‘Barbary slavery’.