Biography

Cheikh Sene holds a PhD in history from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne. His dissertation on "Economy of trade and taxation: the question of customs in Senegambia, from the slave era to the colonial conquest, 17th-19th century", defended in 2020, was awarded the Special Mention of the Jury of the "Fondation pour la Mémoire de l'esclavage” dissertation prize. He was a "Young Doctor" affiliated with the Institut des Mondes Africains (IMAF) Aubervilliers (France) (2020-2022). His work focuses on the commercial relations between sub-Saharan Africa and Europe via the "desert routes" and the Atlantic with a focus on the circulation of objects and their socio-economic impacts in Africa. His research topics also include: the beginnings of modern Africa; empire, imperialism, and colonialism in Africa; and slave trade, slavery, and dependence.

Project Summary

In the second half of the fifteenth century, at a time when Saharan desert trade routes were supplying European and African markets with commodities via the Mediterranean, Portuguese traders opened the new Atlantic route for the slave trade with West Africa. The Sahara desert and Atlantic routes enabled European and African traders to exchange a variety of commodities from Europe (copper, manillas, iron, textiles, glass beads, coral, paper, weapons), Africa (ivory, gold, gum arabic, wax, slaves, ostrich feathers) and Asia (Guinea textiles, cowrie shells ). For more than two centuries, between the founding of the Arguin trading post in Mauritania in 1443 by the Portuguese and the fall of Elmina to the Dutch in 1640, the Portuguese remained the masters of the slave trade in West Africa, specifically in Arguin, Senegambia and the "Rivers of the South," the Gold Coast, Benin and the Slave Rivers, and Congo-Angola. However, in the seventeenth century, the Dutch, French, and English joined the Portuguese in the African trade. Competition became fierce. The intra-European market expanded to meet the increased demand for commodities from European trading companies. This project seeks not only to understand how between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries European commodities brought to Africa by land and sea impacted West African consumption habits, politics, society and economy, but also to understand the impact of African commodities in Europe in the context of the globalization of trade relations.