Class and Credit in a Regional Salt Economy: “The Story of My Father.”

Abstract

This paper is about labor, salt, and the Saharan oasis of Tishit. Literature to date has explored the Mauritanian trade in Ijil rock salt, the large slabs transported by camel caravans into the former French Soudan, today’s Mali, through a flourishing desert-edge economy. Much of that literature emphasizes the role of slave labor. This paper focuses on the roles of the village at the center of this network, Tishit, its local earth-salt (amersal) industry and its freed slaves (haratine). It argues that amersal provided opportunities for haratine to invest in and profit from both the Ijil trade and the larger regional commerce, and it situates their initial involvement in the late nineteenth-century “Tishit diaspora” into the sahel-Soudan. It concludes that like colonial sources themselves, historians have too long subsumed these freed slaves to categories of slave or almost-free, thereby missing the ways in which their actual status as haratine allowed them access to important socially-governed resources and rights.