West Africa’s Islamic Moral Revolutions

The end of the eighteenth century was an age of idealism. People around the Atlantic world sought purification after the rise of commercialisation and the creation of the fiscal military states that sustained the integrating economies of the Atlantic world.  The slave trade was the commercial factor that tied the Atlantic economies together, and at the end of the century, it became the focus of attempts to atone for the excess of consumerism and luxury that pervaded those economies.  While this motivation for the rise of anti-slave trade ideology has been acknowledged with regard to British and American “moral revolutions” in this period, West African states’ own participation in this revolutionary moment has not been incorporated into the broader understanding of Atlantic revolutions.  The revolutionary Imamate of Futa Toro, established along the Senegal River in 1776, outlawed the Atlantic slave trade with the French, drawing up new terms of trade. A number of unsuccessful Islamic revolutions to the south, near Sierra Leone, challenged the dominance of the slave trading elite, beheading the worst offenders, establishing (short-lived) states, and freeing the enslaved.  Drawing West African Islamic revolutionaries into the wider Atlantic story recasts the broader Atlantic context, suggesting an alternative to the idea of anti-slave trade sentiment arising from European sources, adding to the story of slave trade resistance, and challenging the idea of a unique Western humanitarianism.  This paper will explore how a perspective from the edges of the African Atlantic reveals the materiality of the moral revolutions, and challenges their intellectual origins.