The 1848 antislavery law failed to address West Africa’s internal slave trade.

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

• XREF: The gap between universalist ideology and protectorate-respect-for-custom practice mirrors the tension the reader is tracing through this book between declared republican ideals and on-the-ground colonial governance.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that French conquest ‘indirectly fostered’ the internal slave trade it then declined to suppress is a layered causality worth sitting with: expansion into the hinterland both created and excused inaction.