The subject of plantation slavery is a capaciously important one. It connects to questions of labor mobilization and control. It also enables inquiry into violence, dispossession, depersonalization, and resistance. Studies of slavery illuminate practices associated with power, production, and the formation and sustenance of aristocratic culture. For the Sokoto Caliphate, plantation slavery opens a window onto the larger workings of the caliphate's political structure, social hierarchies, and system of production as well as the nature and outcome of warfare, the mobilization of religious idioms, and the importance of patronage.
Mohammed Salau's important book covers all the aforementioned terrains. He theorizes caliphate plantation slavery as both a peculiar and familiar institution inflected by the caliphate's political and Islamic identity. This is not the first work on slavery or slave estates in the Sokoto Caliphate, but Salau is right to state that this is the first comprehensive treatment of state-managed plantations in the historiography of the Sokoto Caliphate.
The book explores the intertwinement of slavery with three important phenomena: power, religion, and production. In the Sokoto Caliphate's slave plantation system, these elements comingled and enabled one another.
Much of the book is, as Salau himself states, a critical synthesis of the historiography of slavery and enslavement in the Sokoto Caliphate, but he also utilizes obscure oral sources as well as rare Arabic and Ajami texts that allow him to intervene more vigorously in the historiography, pose new questions, advance new arguments, and distill old debates into succinct positions that align with the current state of the field.
The most illuminating revisionist contribution of the work is Salau's argument, sustained throughout the book, that the state played an instrumental role in appropriating control of the most fertile agricultural lands, instituting regimes of labor control, preventing slave flight, infusing new slaves through warfare, and mobilizing theological opinion in support of enslavement.
This is a refreshingly new argument that privileges the role of political power, political elites, and aristocratic politics in the emergence and consolidation of slave-worked plantations while also recognizing the force of slave agency in those systems. Most works on plantation slavery in Muslim societies tend to focus inordinately on economic dynamics to the detriment of politics. In this respect, Salau extends the historiography by bringing the political into dialogue with the economic.
The book is, more than anything else, a forceful counterpoint to the old argument that precolonial African societies were characterized by serfdom rather than slavery. Such arguments are usually founded on claims that enslaved Africans had rights, that they were often integrated into the socioeconomic life of the community, that their treatment was relatively benign, and that, in Muslim Africa, manumission, commanded in the Qur'an, mandated and sacralized slavery's integrative character.
Salau's analysis of Sokoto caliphate plantation slavery contradicts these claims. His contentions extend the new critique posited by scholars such as Chouki El Hamel, who has challenged the old thesis of a benign, integrative slavery in Muslim North Africa.Footnote 1 Salau contends that in the Sokoto Caliphate slavery was birthed and sustained by control measures unknown to serfdom.
Furthermore, Salau demonstrates that the Sokoto Caliphate plantation system departed from the integrative Muslim slave model in two ways. The first is that the constancy of warfare, slave raiding, and imperial violence supplied a constant stream of captives to plantations. The second is the fact that ‘masters generally distanced themselves from slaves at the kinship and household level by diverse strategies such as assigning separate residential areas to slaves’ (19).
Salau does not simply reinforce the argument made by Paul Lovejoy that the Sokoto Caliphate was a slave society.Footnote 2 He also demonstrates the nature of the slavery, its peculiarities, and its similarities to other plantation slave societies in East Africa and the New World.
The first six chapters of the book analyze the origins and authorizing idioms of jihad and enslavement, as well as the development, consolidation, and typologies of plantation slavery in the Sokoto caliphate. In these chapters, Salau explicates the ways in which emirs and aristocrats maintained their power, the prestige of the caliphate, and its ability to generate revenue by employing techniques of labor management and agricultural production comparable to the modern capitalist techniques of plantation superintendence which scholars of the United States and New World slavery have studied with remarkable rigor. Here, Salau's work follows the arc of current scholarship on plantation slavery and moves away from a dichotomous approach that posits African slave systems as fundamentally different from chattel slavery in the New World.
The first six chapters also show how the emir of Kano, the caliphate's most economically viable state, exploited the surpluses of plantation agricultural production, how he leveraged plantations to consolidate his power vis-à-vis that of ambitious landowning aristocrat, and how the resistance of enslaved people both complicated and spurred innovations in labor control.
The last chapter is a comparative one, juxtaposing caliphate plantation slavery with similar institutions in East Africa and the Americas. This comparison has immense historiographical significance. Salau's analysis makes the case that caliphal slavery had more in common with the East African and New World iterations than has been explicitly recognized by scholars. A small quibble with this comparison might be the recency of the caliphate and its slavery system relative to East African and New World slaveries. This small point does not take anything away from a carefully crafted, well-researched, and rigorously analyzed study of an African Islamic slave system.
