Nigeria is Africa's most populous country and the world's eighth largest oil producer, but its success has been undermined in recent decades by ethnic and religious conflict, political instability, rampant official corruption and an ailing economy. Toyin Falola, a leading historian intimately acquainted with the region, and Matthew Heaton, who has worked extensively on African science and culture, combine their expertise to explain the context to Nigeria's recent troubles through an exploration of its pre-colonial and colonial past, and its journey from independence to statehood. By examining key themes such as colonialism, religion, slavery, nationalism and the economy, the authors show how Nigeria's history has been swayed by the vicissitudes of the world around it, and how Nigerians have adapted to meet these challenges. This book offers a unique portrayal of a resilient people living in a country with immense, but unrealized, potential.

This volume contains contributions from twenty-four scholars concerning the significance and implications of the world’s borderlands in economic, political, and socio-cultural contexts. Together these essays explore the changing role of borders in a global world. Are borders increasingly irrelevant under conditions of globalization, or can a case be made to demonstrate their continuing importance at various levels of spatial activity? Situating itself within a growing border literature, Holding the Line argues that contemporary borders facilitate parallel processes of globalization and localization of political activity. As such, the essays adopt a holistic approach to understanding the impact of boundaries on both society and space. They demonstrate that any attempt to create a methodological and conceptual framework for the understanding of boundaries must be concerned with the process of bounding, rather than simply the means through which the physical lines of separation are delimited and demarcated. This approach renders the notion of a "borderless world" highly problematic, because the latter ignores the important and ongoing relationship between the functional role of borders in the bounding process, and the symbolic role of borders as imagined social, political, and economic constructions embedded within a geographical text. The changing characteristics of political boundaries during an era of globalization has become a great focus of interdisciplinary study, and this book will appeal to scholars of political geography, border studies, and international relations.

The book traces the history of writing about Nigeria since the nineteenth century, with an emphasis on the rise of nationalist historiography and the leading themes. The second half of the twentieth century saw the publication of massive amounts of literature on Nigeria by Nigerian and non-Nigerian historians. This volume reflects on that literature, focusing on those works by Nigerians in thecontext of the rise and decline of African nationalist historiography. Given the diminishing share in the global output of literature on Africa by African historians, it has become crucial to reintroduce Africans into historicalwriting about Africa. As the authors attempt here to rescue older voices, they also rehabilitate a stale historiography by revisiting the issues, ideas, and moments that produced it. This revivalism also challenges Nigerian historians of the twenty-first century to study the nation in new ways, to comprehend its modernity, and to frame a new set of questions on Nigeria's future and globalization. In spite of current problems in Nigeria and its universities, that historical scholarship on Nigeria (and by extension, Africa) has come of age is indisputable. From a country that struggled for Western academic recognition in the 1950s to one that by the 1980s had emerged as one of the most studied countries in Africa, Nigeria is not only one of the early birthplaces of modern African history, but has also produced members of the first generation of African historians whose contributions to the development and expansion of modern African history is undeniable. Like their counterparts working on other parts of the world, these scholars have been sensitive to the need to explore virtually all aspects of Nigerian history. The book highlights the careers of some of Nigeria's notable historians of the first and second generation. Toyin Falola is Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Saheed Aderinto is Assistant Professor of History at Western Carolina University.

Filling a gap, this study presents a comprehensive history of Nigeria's diverse peoples. The first two chapters provide a geographical and archaeological background. The main body of the work is divided into three sections: Nigeria Before 1800; Nigeria in the 19th century: and Nigeria in the 20th century. Contributors cover a multitude of different issues andregions such as the Benin Kingdom, the trans-atlantic slave trade, nationalist movements, and Borno in the 19th century.

The Izon of the Niger Delta is a global history of the Izon, Ijo, or Ijaw people from their homelands in the Niger Delta, through Nigeria, the West and Central African coastlands, and in the Africa diaspora into Europe, the America's and the Caribbean. It is a preliminary study which raises questions and opens ground for further research. The book provides chapters that take an overview of issues on the environment of the Niger Delta, an analysis of the Ijo population, the language, culture, resources, history and linkage to the rest of Nigeria and the world. In effect these chapters provide a synopsis of the Ijo in the past and their situation in the present.