Reconfiguring Slavery focuses on the range of trajectories followed by slavery as an institution since the various abolitions of the nineteenth century. It also considers the continuing and multi-faceted strategies that descendants of both owners and slaves have developed to make what use they can of their forebears’ social positions, or to distance themselves from them. Reconfiguring Slavery contains both anthropological and historical contributions that present new empirical evidence on contemporary manifestations of slavery and related phenomena in Mauritania, Benin, Niger, Cameroon, Ghana, Senegal, and the Gambia. As a whole, the volume advances a renewed conceptual framework for understanding slavery in West Africa today: instead of retracing the end of West African slavery, this work highlights the preliminary contours of its recent reconfigurations.
Benedetta Rossi is Professor of History at University College London (UCL). She taught at the University of Birmingham from 2012 to 2020, and has held visiting positions at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, Humboldt University in Berlin, and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. Her research focuses on the global and African history of slavery, abolition, labour and migration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded project AFRAB (ERC-AdG-885418, 2020–2026) and Senior Researcher on the ERC-funded project LANGARCHIV.