In 1818 Seku Amadu, drawing on the example of Usman dan Fodio's Sokoto jihad, defeated the Bambara of Segu and founded the Massina Empire, building a new capital at Hamdullahi and requiring nomadic Fulbe to settle in supervised villages under a strict religious code. In 1852 Umar Tal, a Tijani cleric returning from Mecca and Sokoto, launched a second jihad from the upper Senegal, taking Kaarta in 1855 and Segu in 1861 and then turning on the fellow-Muslim state of Massina, sacking Hamdullahi in 1862; he died in 1864 during the revolt that followed. Both movements combined religious reform with conquest: non-Muslim populations, chiefly Bambara, were enslaved in large numbers, and pastoral groups were compelled to settle. The Umarian state's wars depopulated parts of the middle Niger shortly before the French advance of the 1880s and 1890s, which used the disorder as a justification for conquest. Coverage of the Sokoto jihad already exists in this atlas; these two jihads to its west were separate states with separate systems.
Fulani jihad states under Seku Amadu and later Umar Tal conquered the middle Niger, settled nomads and enslaved captured non-Muslim populations
No enumeration exists for the middle Niger in the nineteenth century. The Massina and Umarian states left tax and settlement records that historians use qualitatively, but the population of the conquered Bambara, Fulbe and Songhay territories is unknown, and the first counts come from French colonial administration after 1890, by which time the wars had already reshaped settlement.
No credible toll survives. The sack of Hamdullahi in 1862 and the siege that followed are described in chronicles as producing very heavy loss of life, but the accounts give no numbers that can be checked.
Arabic chronicles of both states and later French colonial reports record enslavement of captives and the destruction of non-Muslim shrines and practices.
Mali