Africa’s Political History through Slave Trade. Patrick Sheehy

J.C. Sharman’s Ties That Bound: Slavery and Political Power in Precolonial Africa

J.C. Sharman, Ties that Bound: Slavery and Power in Africa (2026).

Jason Campbell Sharman

Jason Campbell Sharman is the Sir Patrick Sheehy Professor of International Relations at King’s College, University of Cambridge, and a Professorial Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS). Appointed to Cambridge in 2017, Sharman works at the intersection of international relations and global political economy, with a sustained interest in how formal rules and informal practices jointly shape the distribution of power in the international system. His position at King’s situates him within a long institutional tradition of reflecting on the nature of order, authority, and legitimacy in world politics, even as his own research pushes that tradition into new empirical and conceptual terrain.

Research Agenda: Finance, Empire, and Power

Sharman’s research agenda links the study of international relations and global governance to concrete practices of offshore finance, tax havens, money laundering, and illicit financial flows. Across his work, he traces how legal and quasi-legal mechanisms of financial secrecy reconfigure the possibilities for state authority and private power, showing that the regulation of cross-border capital is central rather than peripheral to the making of contemporary order. In his most recent work, he turns to the political economy of slavery in precolonial Africa, examining how the capture, trade, and exploitation of enslaved people functioned as a technology of rule and a foundation of political power. Taken together, these lines of inquiry illuminate the continuities between financial opacity, imperial expansion, and the coercive infrastructures that have long underpinned global hierarchies.

Books

Sharman is the author of several major monographs that have shaped scholarly debates on international regulation, imperial expansion, and the politics of slavery:

Havens in a Storm: The Struggle for Global Tax Regulation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).
The Money Laundry: Regulating Criminal Finance in the Global Economy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011).
Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).
With Andrew Phillips, Outsourcing Empire: How Company-States Made the Modern World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).
Ties That Bound: Slavery and Political Power in Precolonial Africa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2026).

His articles in leading journals, including International Organization and Review of International Studies, complement these books by extending their core questions into broader debates about international order and its discontents.

Intellectual Stakes

Across these projects, Sharman treats financial regulation, imperial expansion, and slavery not as discrete topics but as linked sites for interrogating how power is constituted, legitimized, and contested in global politics. His work shows that seemingly technical issues—from tax cooperation to anti-money-laundering rules—are bound up with enduring questions about who is protected by international norms, who remains exposed to predation, and how historical forms of coercion continue to shape contemporary inequalities. By moving between the worlds of offshore finance and precolonial African polities, his scholarship underscores the persistence of structural asymmetries in the global system while foregrounding the agency of the actors who navigate, exploit, and resist them. For readers of international relations and global history alike, Sharman’s work offers a rigorous, empirically grounded account of how hidden infrastructures of wealth and coercion have helped make the modern world.

Ties That Bound: Slavery and Power in Africa

J. C. Sharman’s 2026 book, Ties That Bound: Slavery and Power in Africa, turns our usual understanding of African history on its head. Most accounts look at slavery primarily through the lens of social injustice or economic exploitation driven by European expansion. Sharman pushes back, arguing that we need to view enslavement first and foremost as a technology of political power.

His core argument is straightforward: for precolonial African elites, slave trading wasn’t just about turning a profit—it was about building and holding onto power.

The Power Engine: Captives to Authority

At the heart of the book is a self-reinforcing loop that drove political life across the continent:

$$\text{Captives} \longrightarrow \text{Slave Trade} \longrightarrow \text{Wealth \& Weapons} \longrightarrow \text{Armies \& Loyalty} \longrightarrow \text{Political Power} \longrightarrow \text{More Slave Raids}$$

In this environment, capturing and trading people became a matter of basic political survival. If a ruler refused to play the game, a neighboring state would—and then use those profits to acquire firearms, build a bigger army, and conquer them. Ambitious warlords could leverage human trafficking to raise armies, reward loyalists, and carve out new kingdoms.

Crucially, this wasn’t just about shipping people across the ocean. Sharman highlights that by the 19th century, there were actually more enslaved people within Africa than had ever been shipped to the Americas. Enslaved people formed the backbone of local states—working as farmhands, frontline soldiers, royal bureaucrats, and domestic servants.

Global Networks, Local Agency

Sharman avoids two common oversimplifications about how Africa connected to the broader world:

The idea that Europeans imposed slavery out of nowhere.
The idea that African slavery developed completely isolated from outside influences.

Instead, he presents a story of mutual dependency. European merchants and Islamic trading networks needed local African rulers to capture and supply human beings. In return, African elites relied on these foreign traders for the guns, prestige goods, and wealth necessary to dominate their rivals. Foreign demand didn’t create slavery out of thin air, but it dramatically turbocharged the incentives to wage war and capture people.

Key Historical Cases

Sharman grounds his thesis in several specific regional powers:

Dahomey: A prime example of a state whose entire political and military architecture was engineered around acquiring and controlling captives.
Segu: Demonstrates the dark side of this model—a kingdom built on relentless slave raiding that ultimately spiraled into self-destruction.
Sokoto Caliphate: Highlights how political authority, religious jihad, state expansion, and enslavement overlapped on a massive scale.
East Africa & Zanzibar: Shows that these dynamic power structures weren’t tied solely to Atlantic trade, but stretched across Indian Ocean and Islamic commercial networks through Oman, the Swahili coast, and Madagascar.

The Paradox: Strong Rulers, Fragile Societies

Perhaps the sharpest insight in the book is the structural paradox at the core of the slaving state: Slavery made individual rulers stronger while making African society as a whole far more vulnerable.

While an individual king could use slave wealth to build an impressive military, the resulting arms race plunged whole regions into endless warfare, depopulation, and political fragmentation. What made total sense for a ruler’s immediate survival was catastrophic for the continent over the long run.

Ultimately, Sharman links this widespread instability directly to the late 19th-century “Scramble for Africa.” The intense political fragmentation caused by centuries of slave-driven competition left African societies deeply divided and far more vulnerable when European imperial powers moved in to conquer the continent.

Reframing African Political History Through the Lens of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Sharman’s historical analysis fundamentally departs from the reductive Eurocentric narrative that has long dominated popular and academic treatments of African slavery—a narrative that casts European merchants and colonial powers as the principal architects of bondage, implying that African societies were passive victims of external imposition. In this conventional account, slavery emerges as something imposed upon Africa from without, a tragedy authored almost exclusively by foreign demand and Western cupidity. Against this flattened interpretation, Sharman constructs a far more intricate and intellectually demanding model—one that restores genuine political agency to African actors while simultaneously refusing to absolve them of complicity in systems of profound human suffering.

The causal architecture of Sharman’s argument traces a self-reinforcing historical dynamic: the endemic competition among African political actors for power and territorial dominion interacted with external demand from European and Islamic trading networks to create unprecedented incentives for militarization and human capture. As African elites sought to enhance their coercive capacity—by acquiring firearms, maintaining larger standing armies, and distributing prestige goods to secure factional loyalty—the slave trade became not merely an incidental revenue source but a structurally embedded feature of state-building itself. This intensifying commerce in captives simultaneously generated the material means for political expansion while fragmenting regional societies through relentless warfare, depopulation, and the proliferation of rival armed polities competing for the same scarce resource: enslaved human beings. Over generations, this vicious cycle produced societies characterized by deep militarization, chronic political instability, and fractured territorial coherence—conditions that, by the late nineteenth century, rendered African polities profoundly vulnerable to the coordinated imperial conquest of the Scramble for Africa. In short, centuries of slave-driven competition did not merely exploit existing African societies; they fundamentally transformed their political architecture, leaving the continent fragmented precisely at the moment when European imperial powers mobilized their superior industrial capacity to partition and subordinate it.

Sharman’s interpretive intervention possesses considerable intellectual and moral force precisely because it refuses the false choice between exonerating African agency and condemning African actors. Rather than retreat into comfortable moralizing about victimhood or conversely whitewash the brutality of African elites, he illuminates the tragic chasm that opened between the strategic interests of ruling classes and the catastrophic consequences for masses of ordinary people—those captured in raids, enslaved within African polities, or killed in the endless warfare that sustained the slaving state. This distinction proves crucial: to recognize that African rulers made deliberate choices in pursuit of power is not to celebrate those choices or to diminish the systematic cruelty they unleashed, but rather to see African history as a sphere of genuine political contestation, where outcomes were shaped by human decisions and structural incentives rather than by the inexorable march of external forces. In restoring this dimension of agency and contingency, Sharman’s scholarship calls his readers to a more mature and unflinching engagement with African history—one that neither denies the agency of African actors nor obscures the profound injustices they inflicted, but instead traces the intricate pathways through which local ambition, foreign demand, technological innovation, and imperial competition combined to reshape an entire continent.

References and Bibliography

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