Historical Political Economy of the Western Sahel

The Sokoto Caliphate at its peak governed more people than any contemporary African state. The trans-Saharan trade network moved gold, salt, slaves, and manuscripts across thousands of kilometres centuries before European commercial interests reached the interior. The jihad period reshaped political authority, ethnic geography, and land tenure across a region whose modern conflict lines still follow boundaries drawn in that era. The data from this period exists in Arabic manuscripts, colonial administrative records, academic monographs, and survey archaeology. Most of it has never been structured for comparative research.

Volume 2 extracts and organises that record into searchable tables, making the political economy of the pre-partition Western Sahel available as a research resource.