France’s 1848 abolition law did not address interior slavery in West Africa
Evidence
The r 848 law-which the Second Empire did not rescind-forced the Creole elite of the French communes of Senegal to emancipate immediately the 6,ooo slaves currently in their possession. The provisions of the new law were nevertheless aimed primarily at the transatlantic slave trade and plantation slavery in the Antilles; they provided little guidance for dealing with indigenous slavery and the internal market in slaves in West Africa, which the army soon discovered-and which its own policy of conquest indirectly fosteredas it expanded into the Senegalese hinterland. Indeed, the newly conquered territories were made into protectorates, which ostensibly bound the French to respect local customs. One result of this vagueness was that, froin the defeat of the Second Republic until the return of republican institutions in the r87o’s, the French took no further action in Senegal either to suppress the domestic slave trade or to liberate runaway slaves. Even in the Four Communes, where French law was fully in force, local officials regularly returned runaway slaves from the interior to their masters, rather than liberating them as the law stipulated. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 327
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: French conquest itself indirectly fostered the internal slave trade — a contradiction central to the reader’s interest in the ramifications of French rule.
Related
- The 1848 antislavery law failed to address West Africa’s internal slave trade. (similarity 0.96)
- French conquest itself drove Africans into slavery while France posed as liberator. (similarity 0.81)
- French conquest itself drove displaced Africans into new slavery that abolition rhetoric masked. (similarity 0.80)
- French non-enforcement of abolition was a political accommodation to slave-owning chiefs (similarity 0.80)
- French conquest itself drove displaced Africans into slavery while condemning it (similarity 0.79)
- French conquest worsened regional slave-raiding by tolerating the trade (similarity 0.79)
- Warfare and famine renewed slave-raiding that French conquest worsened. (similarity 0.78)