A sophisticated history of colonial interactions in Nigeria during World War II drawing on hitherto unexplored archival resources.

This volume offers a fresh perspective on Africa's central role in the Allied victory in World War II. Its detailed case studies, from all parts of Africa, enable us to understand how African communities sustained the Allied war effort and how they were transformed in the process. Together, the chapters provide a continent-wide perspective.

Britain's declaration of war on Germany on 3 September, 1939, made Nigeria, like many other African societies, active participants in the war against the Axis powers. Leading to large-scale mobilization of human and materials resources, it transformed lives and societies in irrevocable ways. Of the 90,000 West African soldiers deployed to South East Asia after 1943, over half came from Nigeria. In this important, revisionist history, Chima J. Korieh examines how the lives of Nigerian producers, workers, merchants, men, women, and children from across society were affected. It recounts the extraordinary and often neglected story of the Nigerian people who were drawn into a global war, the enormous demands it made on their resources, and the way it would change both their lives and the societies they lived in. By placing the role that African societies played in the war within the contextual and theoretical frameworks of colonialism, race, gender, identity, labour, intellectual, and social history, Korieh challenges the dominant perception that World War II was primarily a European conflict and reveals the global impact of ordinary Nigerians on the war effort.

A transnational history of how Indigenous peoples mobilised en masse to support the war effort on the battlefields and the home fronts.

Nigeria and Nigerians have acquired a notorious reputation for involvement in drug-trafficking, fraud, cyber-crime and other types of serious crime. Successful Nigerian criminal networks have a global reach, interacting with their Italian, Latin American and Russian counterparts. Yet in 1944, a British colonial official wrote that 'the number of persistent and professional criminals is not great' in Nigeria and that 'crime as a career has so far made little appeal to the young Nigerian'. This book traces the origins of Nigerian organised crime to the last years of colonial rule, when nationalist politicians acquired power at a regional level. In need of funds for campaigning, they offered government contracts to foreign businesses in return for kickbacks, in a pattern that recurs to this day. Political corruption encouraged a wider disrespect for the law that spread throughout Nigerian society. When the country's oil boom came to an end in the early 1980s, young Nigerian college graduates headed abroad, eager to make money by any means. Nigerian crime went global at the very moment new criminal markets were emerging all over the world.

Biafra's declaration of independence on May 30, 1967, precipitated a civil war with important implications for the territorial integrity of all newly independent African states. Allegations of genocide commanded the world's attention and brought forth unprecedented humanitarian intervention. This full account of the internationalization of that conflict draws on hitherto confidential records and more than two hundred interviews with foreign policymakers, including Yakubu Gowon and C. Odumegwu Ojukwu. Originally published in 1977. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

A global history of 'Biafra', providing a new explanation for the ascendance of humanitarianism in a postcolonial world.