At the outset of Marie Rodet's important book, the author states, in a bold and creative way, that she has chosen to tell a story of human mobility and social relations in Upper Senegal from a gender perspective. From the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century, Upper Senegal was a bustling economic zone centred on the town of Kayes, then the seat of the French Soudan colony. But, beginning in 1908, when the new capital of Bamako began to develop, and environmental and economic conditions in Upper Senegal began slowly to degrade, the town slumped. Several works have been published on mobility in West Africa, but most of them deal with labour migration in a manner that Catherine Coquery Vidrovitch describes, in her preface to Rodet's book, as ‘asexual and concerned almost exclusively with men’ (p. 5). To fill this void, Marie Rodet chose to ‘deconstruct the androcentric discourse’ (p. 263) that considers labour migration mainly as an arena for men who leave their land by force and/or out of their own volition to seek greener pastures in the new urban centres and the new job opportunities that developed with the advent of colonial society from the early twentieth century (p. 60).

This book was written using oral surveys, an exhaustive review of the archives in indigenous tribunals, and a broad range of written documentation. It is structured in three almost equal parts: ‘Exodes et migrations’, ‘Migrations et stratégies familiales’, and ‘Migrations et contrôle colonial’. The theme of migration cuts through the three sections, manifesting itself in different forms depending on the historical contexts in the period under study (1900–46). It reveals how the exodus of female slaves was neglected by the colonial administration between 1900 and 1920, highlights the importance of family strategies in migration projects, and underlines the dominant role of colonial policy in attempts to control migration.

Rodet's book marks a significant epistemological shift in the analysis of West African labour migration. She skilfully mines facts and figures from the archives to reconstruct a social history of migration devoid of the chauvinism characteristic of colonial discourse and most social science of Upper Senegal. She repositions women in productive activities, in the ‘villages of liberty’, in slave emancipation by exodus, and in forced labour on colonial fields, sisal farms, cotton plantations, and gold mines. Rodet vigorously asserts that women were neither men's ‘helpers’ nor ‘companions’ to husbands. She shows that their movement was not a by-product of male migration but instead central to the migratory process itself. Women even made up the majority of the ‘floating’ population in urban centres such as Kayes (p. 68). Furthermore, women used the might of the law to break away from captivity and sometimes from forced marriages. They moved to Kayes or the urban centres in the territories of Soudan and Senegal, expressing their identity as migrants in search of work and greater social freedom. A gender perspective enables Marie Rodet to write a history that draws on colonial sources without assuming the ‘insider's eyes’ of a colonial administration that treated women as invisible entities. She employs a wealth of imagination and curiosity to retrace women's agency in the archival materials and to depict fully their role in dynamics of migration that accelerated with the emergence of new cash crops (peanuts, cotton, sisal) and new forms of transportation (railways, sea vessels, vehicles).

This book indisputably breaks new ground, while also building on the contributions of well-known scholars of Upper Senegal, such as François Manchuelle, Richard Roberts, Andrew Clark, Martin Klein, and Monique Chastenet. Rodet's empirical account challenges the false dichotomy between modern and domestic/family economy. She instead shows the indivisible nature of an economic system that, in material practice, clearly employs both male and female workers, but maintains, at an ideological and rhetorical level, gender-based division of labour, gender subordination, and disregard for work done by women.

However, let me call your attention to a paradox that the author does not discuss. Is it not surprising that, even as women seized the opportunity to attain higher social status and greater mobility, they remained confined to traditional gender roles as cooks on railway-construction project sites, as concubines of colonial administrators, or as prostitutes to workers on railway-construction projects? This reveals the limitations to the emancipation they had accomplished. It would also have been useful to include some representative illustrations in the book, to help us put a face on the women whom the author has so effectively drawn out of the shadows of history. On the whole, however, these remarks should in no way diminish the magnitude of Marie Rodet's success in using a gender approach with great imagination to reintegrate women in the migratory history of Upper Senegal.