"Dangerous Vagabonds": French Senegal and Resistance to Slave Emancipation

"Dangerous Vagabonds" examines the problem of illicit slavery in Senegal following the 1848 emancipation law. Where traditional scholarship relates its persistence to the economic and logistic pressures in the region, as well as a strong indigenous tradition of forced labor, this study goes further to show that inherent factors within the culture of French colonialism made abolishing the institution exceedingly difficult.

In 1848, when slavery was abolished across greater France, the practic...