The Inland Shore: an Intimate History of Muslim West Africa, 1804-1960
My first book project, tentatively titled The Inland Shore, offers a longue-durée history of social and political change in the Sahel, told through intimate and family relationships. Bringing disparate 19th and 20th century histories together, the book explores the era of Islamic revolutions in the Sahel’s inland Delta, the region’s integration in capitalist circuits through the Atlantic world, its connections to the Sahara through trade and religious networks, and shows how all these dynamics unraveled through the era of decolonization in Mali. Focusing on the little-studied region of Mopti, and anchored around households, burial sites, kitchen stoves, market stalls and photographers’ studios, the book moves between the global and the local to analyze the way Sahelian Muslim communities contended with large-scale mutations they experienced in the modern era.