Hidden Economies: Women's Economic Agency and Seclusion in Hausaland, 1804 to Present

Since the 1804 Sokoto jihad, female seclusion (kulle) has structured women's economic life in the Muslim emirates of Northern Nigeria, confining married women to the household while official records registered only public, male-dominated production. This study investigates how women sustained economic activity within and beyond seclusion, addressing the historical problem of an archive that mistook their invisibility for economic absence. It covers the Hausa-speaking emirates of Northern Nigeria from 1804 to the present. It draws on colonial administrative and abolition records, ethnographic literature from the 1970s and 1980s and oral interviews conducted in 2026 with women and intermediaries across Kano, Sokoto, Katsina and Kaduna. It finds that Caliphal women controlled separate property, kuɗin kai and kayan ɗaki and dominated hand-spinning until abolition, and the post-1911 groundnut boom spread seclusion downward through the population, while cheap imported cloth destroyed hand-spinning by 1952; women then redirected earnings into food processing, oil pressing and craft, marketed through child intermediaries as hidden trade, persisting into postcolonial house trade and rotating credit associations, partially disrupted by girls' schooling and surviving today alongside persistent financial exclusion. The study concludes that seclusion relocated rather than eliminated women's economic agency and that conventional economic measurement has undervalued it.