With the gradual abolition of the transatlantic slave trade over the course of the nineteenth century, Africans often disappear from historical accounts of global migration. When historians discuss the development of the Age of Mass Migration, they refer almost exclusively to the large-scale movement of populations originating in Europe, East, and South Asia. Our panel roots Africans in the Age of Mass Migration. We explore migrations in the Western Sahel region of Africa–particularly in the Senegambia and Upper Niger areas–to demonstrate the fundamental role that African migrants played in the expansion of industrial economies, the consolidation of transnational labor and capital networks, and the spread of Islam. We argue that West Africans migrated outside the frameworks of European slaving and colonization in creative ways to pursue their own ends. More broadly, they participated in the emerging nineteenth-century industrial economy and global circulation of ideas on their own terms. Furthermore, our panel explores how the Age of Mass Migration impacted the history of the Western Sahel, especially in the realms of commodity production, the private sphere, labor regimes, and intellectual life. In sum, we seek to understand how Western Sahelians understood their place in the world.

Our panel continues the work begun by Adam McKeown, a historian of Chinese migrants and global migration. As McKeown suggested in his 2004 article “Global Migration, 1846-1940,” Africans and Asians frequently migrated according to their own desires and needs as industrial capitalism expanded across the world in the nineteenth century. It is only by paying close attention to local networks of migratory streams and capital flows that historians can understand how and why Africans and Asians participated in the global economy. We also follow a trail Tiffany Ruby Patterson and Robin D.G. Kelley laid in their 2000 article “Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and the Making of the Modern World.” We answer Patterson and Kelley’s call to contribute to “a theoretical framework and conception of world history that treats the African diaspora as a unit of analysis” in a way that illuminates “the full range of black transnational political, cultural, and intellectual life.” In this vein, we analyze the trajectory of Western Sahelians across the nineteenth century, both from and within the region, and across different scales, from the trajectory of a single sojourner to the collective recruitment of contract laborers. Through these varied perspectives, we seek to explore how long-distance migrations integrated regional migratory networks and how human migrations contributed to the mobility of ideas, objects and practices linking the Western Sahel to the Caribbean, metropolitan France, Central Africa, the Indian Ocean rim and the South China Sea.

Our panel would be of particular interest to historians of migration regardless of geographical specialization. We also welcome scholars interested in labor, capitalism, imperialism, and Islam.