About this book:

"Bound Within: Internal Slavery, Social Structures, and Emancipation in Africa" challenges the Atlantic-centric view of slavery by comprehensively exploring the continent's diverse and deeply embedded systems of unfreedom. The book argues that forms of bondage in Africa—including household servitude, pawnship, militia slavery, agrarian dependence, and clientage—were not mere precursors to the transatlantic slave trade but complex, adaptive institutions central to African social, political, and economic formations. It emphasizes the fluidity of status, where individuals could move between categories of dependency, often through negotiation, strategic service, or conversion, rather than being fixed in a singular, immutable condition.

The book delves into regional case studies, illustrating how these systems varied across different ecologies and economies—from the cavalry states of the Sahel and the royal courts of West African kingdoms like Asante, Oyo, and Dahomey, to the Swahili coastal trading towns, the Ethiopian highlands, Central African polities like Kongo, and the pastoral frontiers of the Tuareg, Somali, and Oromo. Each region developed distinct mechanisms for incorporating and managing dependents, often blurring the lines between kin, client, and captive. These chapters highlight how labor was organized not solely for economic output but also for political reproduction, status display, and social cohesion, demonstrating the intricate ways human relationships were shaped by coercion, yet also by opportunities for mobility and influence.

A central theme is the nuanced process of emancipation, which often unfolded "from within" through local edicts, religious reforms (both Islamic and Christian), and community-level debates, long before and alongside external colonial pressures. The book analyzes how the aftermath of legal abolition created complex "afterlives" of dependency, where issues of land access, labor relationships, and citizenship remained contested. Emancipation rarely meant a clean break from past hierarchies, but rather a prolonged negotiation of new social contracts, often preserving older forms of obligation under new names.

Methodologically, the book integrates a wide array of sources, including oral histories, court records, missionary accounts, Islamic legal texts, and archaeological evidence, to reconstruct the lived experiences of unfreedom and resistance. It pays particular attention to gendered lives, recognizing women's crucial roles in reproductive and domestic labor, and the specific pathways to agency and constraint they navigated. Children, too, are highlighted as vital actors whose malleable status was strategically managed through age grades and other institutions, shaping the future of social reproduction. Ultimately, "Bound Within" positions African experiences of bondage and freedom as central to a global understanding of these phenomena, urging a rethinking of universal definitions of slavery and freedom to encompass the continent's profound and diverse historical realities.