This study of Muslims' writings on colonialism in northern Nigeria illuminates the complexities of Muslims' reactions to British indirect rule, revealing new perspective on the subject. It is based on Arabic texts, poems, Hausa novels, and treatises on Islamic law.

A revelatory account of British imperialism's shameful impact on Africa's most populous state.

This book situates protection at the centre of the global history of empires, thus advancing a new perspective on world history.

Historians of colonial Africa have largely regarded the decade of the Great Depression as a period of intense exploitation and colonial inactivity. In Colonial Meltdown, Moses E. Ochonu challenges this conventional interpretation by mapping the determined, at times violent, yet instructive responses of Northern Nigeria’s chiefs, farmers, laborers, artisans, women, traders, and embryonic elites to the British colonial mismanagement of the Great Depression. Colonial Meltdown explores the unraveling of British colonial power at a moment of global economic crisis. Ochonu shows that the economic downturn made colonial exploitation all but impossible and that this dearth of profits and surpluses frustrated the colonial administration which then authorized a brutal regime of grassroots exactions and invasive intrusions. The outcomes were as harsh for Northern Nigerians as those of colonial exploitation in boom years. Northern Nigerians confronted colonial economic recovery measures and their agents with a variety of strategies. Colonial Meltdown analyzes how farmers, women, laborers, laid-off tin miners, and Northern Nigeria’s emergent elite challenged and rebelled against colonial economic recovery schemes with evasive trickery, defiance, strategic acts of revenge, and criminal self-help and, in the process, exposed the weak underbelly of the colonial system. Combined with the economic and political paralysis of colonial bureaucrats in the face of crisis, these African responses underlined the fundamental weakness of the colonial state, the brittleness of its economic mission, and the limits of colonial coercion and violence. This atmosphere of colonial collapse emboldened critics of colonial policies who went on to craft the rhetorical terms on which the anticolonial struggle of the post–World War II period was fought out. In the current climate of global economic anxieties, Ochonu’s analysis will enrich discussions on the transnational ramifications of economic downturns. It will also challenge the pervasive narrative of imperial economic success.

First Published in 1965. This book recounts Nigeria under British rule and is dedicated by the author to Mr Joseph Chamberlain who was Secretary of State for the Colonies from 1895 to 1903. It includes the areas of Lagos and the Niger coast as revenue generators, the Niger Delta Protectorate, the Royal Niger Company, and Amalgamated Nigeria from 1914.

DIVExamines the role of media technologies in shaping urban Africa through an ethnographic study of popular culture in northern Nigeria./div

This book takes as its theme the ways in which governments legitimate their rule, both to themselves and to their subjects. Its introduction explores legitimacy and pre-colonial states, but the three sections of the book deal with colonial legitimacy, the question of legitimation in the transition from colonialism to majority rule, and the contemporary debate about accountability.