Collection of 7 illustrations from French and Italian periodicals on the French conquest of Senegal and the Senegal people, 1874-1891. B
Price: $280.00
Note: After two periods of British occupation, Saint-Louis and Gorée were returned to France in 1816. When attempts to grow cotton near Saint-Louis proved unprofitable, the colonial economy came to depend on trade for gum in the Sénégal Valley, where an upriver station was founded at Bakel.
In the 1830s two coastal factories, at Carabane and Sédhiou, were acquired in Casamance. In 1848 the ailing colonial economy was further disrupted when the Second Republic outlawed slavery on French soil.In 1854, at the request of local merchants, Napoleon III appointed as governor Commandant Louis-Leon-Cesar Faidherbe , who began to establish French military hegemony. He soon came into conflict with al-Hajj ‘Umar, a Tukulor from Fouta-Toro who, having become regional head of the Tijaniyah fraternity, was establishing an economic and military power base in the upper Niger Valley; but a military stalemate after 1857 led to a truce of coexistence.
When Faidherbe retired in 1865, French power was paramount over most of the territory of modern Senegal; and growing exports of peanuts, through the new colonial port of Dakar, were providing some economic resources.In 1879 the French government approved a large program of railway construction. One line was designed to facilitate penetration of 'Umar's empire; another linked Saint-Louis with Dakar through the main peanut area in Kajor, where commercialization and indebtedness were already disturbing Faidherbe's system of collaboration. In 1886 the deposed damel (king), Lat Jor, died in battle against the French;
Islamic legitimacy among the Wolof now passed to his kinsman Amadu Bamba Mbake; he became spiritual leader of a new fraternity, the Muridiyah, whose devotees were exhorted to discharge their religious obligations by diligent cultivation of peanuts. Meanwhile, France was consolidating direct control over the rest of Senegal and other African colonies. In 1895 Jean-Baptiste Chaudié became first governor-general of French West Africa, and in 1902 its capital moved to Dakar.