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This book makes important contributions to the continuing academic debates concerning the character of slavery in precolonial Africa and the significance of elite slavery in the Islamic world. Stilwell's study focuses on the royal slavery in Kano, one of the leading emirates of the Sokoto Caliphate. Located in what is today northern Nigeria, the caliphate was established by the jihad led by the Islamic cleric and political reformer Usman dan Fodio in the early 19th century. In subsequent decades, slavery became a central social, economic, and political institution in the caliphate. The author argues that Kano's royal slaves (whom he chooses for comparative purposes to call "Mamluks," although they were never known by that term in Kano) were indeed slaves ; nonetheless, they came to exercise considerable political and administrative power, and they developed a largely autonomous slave community and an extensive network of kin groups. These apparent contradictions are what lead Stilwell to use the phrase "paradoxes of power" in the title of his book. The book's arguments are based on a careful study of colonial-era documents found principally in the Nigerian National Archives and on an impressive array of oral interviews, conducted by the author and others, among present-day holders of titled offices in Kano.
In the introductory chapter, Stilwell describes the emergence of the Sokoto Caliphate as a unified empire created from the ancient, disparate Hausa city-states of the west-central Sudan. He situates his work in the comparative context of studies of slavery in Africa and the Islamic world. Following the path-breaking work of Orlando Patterson and M.I. Finley, Stilwell defines his subjects, Kano's royal slaves, as natally alienated, kinless, owned outsiders who lacked honor; not for him the "assimilationist" model of African slavery was developed by Suzanne Miers and...