Ethnicity and the Colonial State compares the choices of community leaders in three different West African groups (Wolof, Temne, and Ewe), with regard to “selling” their identifications to the colonial rulers. The book thereby addresses ethnicity as a factor in global history.

Routledge is proud to be re-issuing this landmark series in association with the International African Institute. The series, published between 1950 and 1977, brings together a wealth of previously un-co-ordinated material on the ethnic groupings and social conditions of African peoples. Concise, critical and (for its time) accurate, the Ethnographic Survey contains sections as follows: Physical Environment Linguistic Data Demography History & Traditions of Origin Nomenclature Grouping Cultural Features: Religion, Witchcraft, Birth, Initiation, Burial Social & Political Organization: Kinship, Marriage, Inheritance, Slavery, Land Tenure, Warfare & Justice Economy & Trade Domestic Architecture Each of the 50 volumes will be available to buy individually, and these are organized into regional sub-groups: East Central Africa, North-Eastern Africa, Southern Africa, West Central Africa, Western Africa, and Central Africa Belgian Congo. The volumes are supplemented with maps, available to view on routledge.com or available as a pdf from the publishers.

Examines the land, life, and history of the Wolof people of West Africa.

Authoritative account of 400 years of West African history by a leading scholar.

Situated along the Senegal River, the Kingdom of Waalo was the smallest of the Wolof states of Senegal, but it illustrates the broader consequences of a shift from trans-Saharan to trans-Atlantic commerce during a time of competing European, Muslim, and indigenous African forces. From the establishment of a French trading post in 1659 to the early nineteenth century, the history of Waalo was closely tied to French interests in St. Louis, popular revolutionary Islamic movements, and internal rivalries between competing royal families and provincial leaders. Stimulating Waalo's socio-political changes were the devastations and fluctuations of the Atlantic slave trade, as well as the Muslim attack on its aristocracy. Torn by internal divisions, devastated by French and Berber incursions, Waalo's institutions and its economy declined. Residents of Waalo sought their own solutions only for external agents to ruin their efforts. By the nineteenth century, the French attempted to establish a plantation economy in Waalo, culminating in their military control of the state and the Senegal valley. This newly translated study is a vital tool in our understanding of Senegal's history, its place in the era of trans-Saharan and trans-Atlantic commerce, and its development into the present. The book should be of value to African studies scholars, anthropologists, and historians of Africa, colonialism, empire, and post-colonialism.

West African history is inseparable from the history of the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism. According to historical archaeologist François Richard, however, the dominance of this narrative not only colors the range of political discourse about Africa but also occludes many lesser-known—but equally important—experiences of those living in the region. Reluctant Landscapes is an exploration of the making and remaking of political experience and physical landscapes among rural communities in the Siin province of Senegal between the late 1500s and the onset of World War II. By recovering the histories of farmers and commoners who made up African states’ demographic core in this period, Richard shows their crucial—but often overlooked—role in the making of Siin history. The book also delves into the fraught relation between the Seereer, a minority ethnic and religious group, and the Senegalese nation-state, with Siin’s perceived “primitive” conservatism standing at odds with the country’s Islamic modernity. Through a deep engagement with oral, documentary, archaeological, and ethnographic archives, Richard’s groundbreaking study revisits the four-hundred-year history of a rural community shunted to the margins of Senegal’s national imagination.