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The Impact of West African Trade on the Distribution of Chimpanzee and Elephant Populations (Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, 19th–20th Century)

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Abstract

This article elaborates a relational historical geography of human, chimpanzee and elephant populations, working mainly from precolonial and early colonial (nineteenth and twentieth century) narratives by travellers to regions now corresponding to parts of Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and Senegal. It then compares a global ‘West African trade’ model of human and animal population’s spatial distribution with elements of an ‘East African settlement colony’ model drawn from other historical research. This perspective balances mainstream evolutionary approaches to animal biogeography with the human history, ecology and the geopolitics of their habitats. Taking such historical processes into account helps to unravel contrastive spatial and temporal dynamics of large mammal populations and to raise new questions about the anthropogenic causes of present-day population distributions.

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Notes

  1. With the exception of Anonymous 1903 and Lemoine 1903, which are reviews of travellers’ conversations by other authors.

  2. All translations from the French are by the author.

  3. In fact, the trade in elephant ivory is documented over a much longer timescale than this study addresses. Ivory was one of the main items traded with Europeans in many parts of the coast of Guinea, including between the Rio Nunez and Cape Verga regions, since the seventeenth century (Rodney 1970:154–155).

  4. Elephants are also reported to the north of the Fouta Djallon by de Rochebrune (1883: 55) and Chautard (1905: 162).

  5. A reference to the slave raids conducted by the Fouta Djallon Empire on its margins.

  6. The taxonomy of African elephants has been regularly discussed over the last 15 years with respect to the species status of “forest” vs “savanna” elephants (Sukumar 2003:52–54; Ishida et al. 2011). Here, the distinction between forest and savanna elephants refers to their feeding behaviour (Sukumar 2003:45).

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Acknowledgments

The field and library research for this article was initially conducted as part of the ‘Evolution, Natures et Cultures’ interdisciplinary program directed by Frédéric Joulian at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. It was also partly supported by the “Tremplin pour l’Avenir” grant of the Société Francophone de Primatologie (Plélan le Grand, France). The article was written during two postdoctoral tenures that were respectively funded by the Société d’Ethnologie (Nanterre, France), the Fondation des Treilles (Paris), and the Fondation de France (Paris), and the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (Tokyo). Special thanks to Koji Hayashi for checking the final version of this manuscript, to Amanda Leblan for helping me to improve the English, and to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.

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Leblan, V. The Impact of West African Trade on the Distribution of Chimpanzee and Elephant Populations (Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, 19th–20th Century). Hum Ecol 42, 455–465 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-014-9654-8

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