"Dangerous Vagabonds": French Senegal and Resistance to Slave Emancipation (Routledge Studies in Modern History)

"Dangerous Vagabonds" examines the problem of illicit slavery in Senegal following the 1848 emancipation law.Where traditional scholarship relates its persistence to the economic and logistic pressures in the region, as well as a strong indigenous tradition of forced labor, this study goes further to show that inherent factors within the culture of French colonialism made abolishing the institution exceedingly difficult. In 1848, when slavery was abolished across greater France, the practice remained virtually intact in the French colony of Senegal on the west coast of Africa.Slavery would continue to be practiced in the colony and its expanding borderlands until at least 1905, when this study ends.This work takes a multi-faceted approach by examining three aspects of French imperial culture that mitigated slave freedom in Senegal: the views of race and slavery maintained by Senegal’s influential métis (mixed-race) population; French ethnological assessments of the aptitude and capabil