Paper short abstract:

This paper will, via an examination of the uptake, scale and particular trajectory of labour migration from Barotseland, present-day western Zambia, examine the hitherto overlooked connections between precolonial slavery, abolition, emancipation and labour migration in Central Africa c.1890 to 1940.

Paper long abstract:

Recent work, particularly from scholars studying slavery and emancipation in West Africa, has highlighted the hitherto neglected importance of the links between migration and emancipation in the economic and labour history of Africa. This paper, inspired by this new intellectual departure, attempts to give the history of Central Africa a similar treatment. In order to do so, this paper will trace the deeply interwoven history of slavery, abolition and labour migration which lies at the heart of the transformation of the powerful, centralised precolonial Lozi kingdom into one of southern Africa's colonial migrant labour reserves par excellence. While cognisant of the fact the subject has tended to dominate economic histories of the region to the detriment of other issues, this paper seeks to demonstrate that there remains much to be gained through a new approach labour migration.

Focusing on a series of crucial events over half a century, this paper will examine the integration of Barotseland into emerging colonial economies, but inject for the first time the question of emancipation into the familiar economic equations said to govern the rise of labour migration in region. More widely, it will both cast new light on the nineteenth-century history of slavery in central Africa, and demonstrate a clear relationship between precolonial slavery and colonial migrant labour. It is this fundamental dynamic - the transformation of an economy based upon slavery into one based upon migrant labour, the transformation of slaves into migrant labourers - that is the central concern of this paper.