They founded the vast Toucouleur Empire in the 19th century under Omar Saidou Tall who led a religious war against the neighboring ethnic groups and the French colonial forces.

[2][4] The Toucouleur are traditionally sedentary, settled primarily in the Senegal River valley, with farming, fishing and raising cattle as their main activities.

The Toucouleur society has been patrilineal, polygynous and with high social stratification that included slavery and a caste system.

[7] The name Toucouleur is of unclear origin, with some sources stating it as a French derivation meaning "of every color", which itself may be a folk etymology.

[8] The supposed distinction between Toucouleurs and Fula people more generally was invented by French ethnographers in the 19th century.

They differentiated between supposedly sedentary, agricultural, fanatical, and anti-European Toucouleurs on one hand and nomadic, pastoralist, docile and cooperative Peulhs on the other, but the dichotomy is false.

[10][11] A mutually acceptable bantering-style interaction, called the joking relationship by anthropologists, exists between the Serers and Toucouleurs.

[12] The Toucouleur people have long inhabited the Senegal River area, with roots of an organized Tekrur kingdom tracing back to the 5th century.

He returned to West Africa in 1833, and subsequently learned political and state building strategies from his father-in-law in the Sokoto Caliphate.

He obtained weapons from Europe,[14] then mobilized the Toucouleur to pursue an Islamic holy war in 1854 against the non-Muslim ethnic groups and those Muslims who had strayed.

The religious leaders were not necessarily endogamous nor an inherited post in Toucouleur people's long history, but it has been rare for lower caste people to become religious specialist, states Rüdiger Seesemann, as they were viewed as not sufficiently adhering to the "clerical standards of piety".

[citation needed] One week after pémbougale (childbirth), the baby is named and a gorgol (sister of the father) cuts its hair.