E. Ann McDougall:
training and research biography

I joined the University of Alberta in 1986, having received my PhD from the University of Birmingham, U.K. (1980) and a BA (1975) and MA (1976) from the University of Toronto. An inspiring and energetic professor in my first year ‘Third World History’ course,(Martin A Klein, Prof. Emeritus) enticed me away from dreams of law school and into the challenges of African History. I spent a ‘junior-year-abroad’ at the University of Birmingham UK (1973-4) – and never regretted my subsequent decision to move into African Studies.

I returned to Birmingham for PhD research with Professor of Economic History, A G Hopkins (since of schools in Geneva and Oxford, Professor Emeritus and Chair, Austin, Texas). My subject was the role of a largely unknown Saharan salt mine in northern Mauritania named Ijil. I traced its history from (arguably) medieval origins to the turn of the twentieth century, with my central question being how its production and trade generated wealth – and supported ‘power’ – in this Western part of the Sahara.
As it was controlled by a famous religious (Islamic) group, and involved a multitude of ‘workers’ and ‘transporters’ who crossed the Sahara to profitable markets on its southern shores, the thesis inevitably drew me into looking more closely at ‘Islam’ as it evolved among the peoples I dealt with, and at the social and economic issues surrounding ‘labour’ during this same era.

Even as I undertook research for this thesis, however, I realized that my idea of economic history was much more embedded in social and cultural history than that of my supervisor and others (at the time) in the field. It was the initial archival work in Mali and Mauritania that ultimately convinced me working with the ‘written record’ was not enough to understand the nature of the ‘problem’ and not enough to raise relevant, original questions. The latter needed the perspective and insights I could only obtain by talking with local people – in other words,  ‘oral interviews’. While I remain convinced that this obsession to ‘talk with people’ does not quite make me an Anthropologist,  I have to admit that since my thesis research, I have always combined both the ‘written’ and the ‘oral’ in all of my projects. And it is the ‘oral’ that keeps me engaged and excited about what I do.

My first major research project after the thesis (“A Family Affair” funded by SSHRC 1993-6), continued my interest in Saharan commerce but shifted from the commodity (previously ‘salt’ and its exchange goods) to the people – the families, tribes, workers – who moved not only across but permanently into the Sahara in the interests of commerce more generally defined. This project took me to Southern Morocco (specifically to Goulimine) for the first time: here I both tracked down written materials (letters, commercial registers) belonging to prosperous merchant families and traced their personal histories through interviews with contemporary family members. My intent (only partially achieved to date) was to integrate this material with my understanding of Moroccan integration into Central Mauritania in the late 19th, early 20th centuries. And to reveal something more of the ‘inter-regional’ significance of commercial relations to our understanding of ‘inter-national’ trade – namely, the so-called ‘trans-Saharan’ trade.

That research has yielded several publications and presentations (evident in my CV). But in all honestly, its most important ‘gift’ to me was an unintended one: an interview with a former concubine (‘slave mistress’) of one of these prosperous merchants.  I first interviewed her to learn about her former master. I returned twice more to learn about her. (And my assistant added a critical interview later, with her son.) She was the ‘Fatma’ who inspired and provided the data for possibly my most important article “A sense of self…” (see CV).  This was the interview that (unbeknownst to me at the time) would fairly dramatically ‘shift’ my research focus towards people of her status – slaves, former slaves, female slaves, concubines – for the remainder of my research career, at least to date! Fatma was also responsible for keeping me rooted at least in part in southern Morocco, even as I became very much more engaged with Mauritania over the past couple of decades.

I might underscore here that exciting research is often research that leads you along new paths: my initial questions remain as valuable (and ‘valid’) as that particular research (on ‘trans-Saharan commercial families’). But where it led me -- or where I allowed myself to be led, perhaps more accurately,   has become equally valuable and valid. To my mind, THIS is how we grow as researchers.

In 2008, I received my second major (multi-year) SSHRC grant, after working with smaller university-level grants in the intervening years. This was to undertake a comparative Mauritania-Southern Morocco study of a fascinating group called hratin, in the company of a long-time Mauritanian scholar, sociologist Abdel Wedoud ould Cheikh. This interdisciplinary project was extremely ambitious – perhaps too ambitious – but worthwhile nevertheless [see ‘The Invisible People’, below]. The overall ‘project’ necessitates a lot of work with early primary written (Arabic and European language sources), as well as comparative secondary literature but the funding primarily supported extensive interviewing in southern Morocco (this time along the whole Dra’a valley) and Mauritania (this time in all the regions I had not worked in previously, the south and east). In addition, ‘urban’ interviews were carried out in the main cities: Nouakchott, Casablanca, Rabat. The interviews with people variously referred to as ‘freed slaves’ or ‘hratin’ (the project showed that these were not necessarily synonyms),  in total numbered around 150 (carried out in several languages); interviews with intellectuals, journalists, politicians about the ‘invisible people’ (carried out mostly in French) involved another 40 or so interviews. To accomplish this, I needed to work with a ‘team’ of local researchers – perhaps the most challenging and rewarding part of the project. Unfortunately, only one ‘assistant’ was permitted in Morocco, while a ‘team’ of three additional local scholars was approved in Mauritania; we had occasion to bring them all together in 2011. Various aspects of differential ‘approval’ by the two countries’ authorities were in themselves revealing of how hratin were perceived differently – a not insignificant aspect of the study!

In 2018, I received a third SSHRC Insight grant to look at the history of the mine-workers who were engaged with Mauritania's first modern industry, the iron-ore complex in Zouerate that ships raw ore almost 700kms across the desert on what is called the 'world's longest train' to the Atlantic port of Nouadhibou. My initial project saw these workers primarily as haratine [see SSRHC project (2018-23)]. And while it is true that I initially had interviews with haratine who were among its early 1960s workers and that recently, statistics tell us the majority of workers are haratine, what my research revealed is that the first generation or two or workers were NOT, for the most part of this social class! This is an example of on-the-ground research actually challenging the original hypothesis. It is also an example of persistence paying off. It took some time to locate and get access to the kind of Company archives that are rich in social history. As it happened, this occured at the peak of the Covid pandemic, so perhaps all the more amazing. The upshot is that I now find the project focusing principally on the early years of the company, from the 1950s when it used local labour to put infrastructure in place, through the 1960s when labour was recruited from as far away as Senegal and Guinea and when Mauritania knew its first workers' strike, through to the 1970s when it transitioned to a 'nationalized' Mauritanian company (SNIM) in 1974 and when it survived -- just barely -- the challenges of the War in the Sahara in the last part of the decade. I am now working with a massive data base of worker information that includes computerized records, physical personnel archives and interviews with retired miners, as well as former CEOs. I'm therefore shifting my focus more into labour history methodologies and current historiography, while still trying to explore the intersection between African and Global labour. This is hugely exciting and I am not yet sure where it will lead in the coming years.