Documenting Interpersonal Conflict in Senegal during the First Quarter the Twentieth Century

Abstract

In the early twentieth century, in countries of former French West Africa, new adjudicatory bodies, the so-called “native courts,” were created and managed by the French colonial administration to handle disputes between native people. The monitoring of court activity generated high-frequency litigation data that provide a unique opportunity to document interpersonal conflict in a context of colonial rule undergoing rapid transformation. This paper has three objectives: (i) to describe the institutional framework that gave rise to the case registers, “Les États Récapitulatifs,” upon which this research is based; (ii) to detail our method for compiling time series of cases adjudicated by the native courts of Senegal; (iii) to describe certain time trends in the dynamics of cases adjudicated by these courts. We conclude by discussing how this database could be used to better understand the economic and political roots of interpersonal conflict.