Examines African debates on captivity, legal and illegal enslavement, and religious and ethnic identity in the era of West African jihads. In this pioneering study—the first to cover ransoming, or the release of a prisoner prior to enslavement for cash or kind, in African regions south of the Sahara—Jennifer Lofkrantz focuses on a broad temporal and geographical area ranging from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries and including present-day Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and Morocco. The work concentrates particularly on the nineteenth-century jihad era and on the Sokoto Caliphate and the...