Please join us for the 2024 Fusco Distinguished Lecture event with Bruce Hall (University of California - Berkeley). Lecture will be 4:30-6pm, followed by a reception.
Location: Dodd Center, Konover Auditorium
Fusco Lecture: Timbuktu, the ‘End of the World’ and the Work of Commercial Capitalism in 19thC Africa
Abstract: Timbuktu is a famously remote city, but in the nineteenth century it was an important node in a series of overlapping economic networks that ultimately connected the Niger Bend region in modern-day Mali to wider flows of global merchant capital. The anthropologist Judith Scheele (2012) has described what she calls ‘Saharan connectivity’, in which extended families and networks of regional specialization and interdependence arose to control commercial exchange. The historian Ghislaine Lydon (2009) has argued that Islamic legal tools were the primary institutional bases of Saharan trade. But both of these frameworks of Saharan interconnection tend to present a largely unchanging ‘pre-colonial’ picture which misses the ways that commercial structures and institutions changed as Saharan trade expanded and intensified in the second half of the nineteenth century. In this talk I try to better situate Timbuktu in time, showing how we might imagine a history of Timbuktu in the nineteenth century that is connected to the expansion of global commercial capitalism, European imperialism, and currents of Islamic thought. Focusing on how Timbuktu was connected, rather than necessarily isolated from, larger global processes makes it possible to write a new kind of history of what is often blandly referred to as “precolonial” Africa.
Hall’s work is located at the intersection between West Africa’s Muslim high intellectual culture and social and economic issues which that intellectual culture sought to address. His first book, A History of Race in Muslim West Africa, 1600-1960, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2011. It is an intellectual history of arguments made about race and slavery in the West African Sahel. It reveals the long history of racial ideas in this region, and the different work that racial ideas were made to do over a period of more than three hundred years.
He is currently working on a second book project that focuses on the history of enslaved commercial agents in a nineteenth-century Saharan commercial network that connected Ghadames (Libya) and Timbuktu (Mali), among other places. Using more than a thousand Arabic letters found today in Timbuktu from the same extended family firm, he has identified a number of literate slaves who acted as commercial representatives for their masters in different markets of the Niger Bend region between 1850 and 1900. These slaves wrote and received letters to/from their masters. The book is tentatively called Bonds of Trade: Slavery and Commerce in the 19th-century circum-Saharan World.
This is an Honors Event
For more information, contact: History at kira.svirskiy@uconn.edu