Toyin Falola's Understanding Colonial Nigeria: British Rule and Its Impact offers a sweeping analysis of the coming, course, and consequences of British rule in Nigeria. As primarily a work of synthesis, the volume leverages decades of scholarship to reach a firm conclusion about how British efforts to extract profit and power shaped West African history. In short, colonialism created a modern state encompassing hundreds of ethnicities in a region without historical preconditions for such a polity. It did so at the expense of cultural displacement, economic underdevelopment, political disunity, and social tumult. As a result, Falola argues that Nigeria's current struggles are inextricable from imperialism and that to overcome these challenges the world must reckon with enduring colonial legacies.The volume is divided into five chronological parts composed of predominantly thematic chapters. Part I outlines methodological, historiographic, and institutional developments in Nigerian historical research since the legal establishment of the National Archives in 1957. Part II turns to the gradual colonization of present-day Nigeria prior to World War I. During the nineteenth century, Britons’ commercial enterprises and Christianizing endeavors served as the harbingers of the British Empire. As this informal imperialism gave way to formal conquest, the region's cultural diversity and political discord altered the colonizers’ schemes. For example, local conditions clashed with Britons’ preference for unitary government thereby prompting the adoption of a “divide and rule” approach. This strategy manifested in the division of Nigeria into northern and southern protectorates by 1900, and it ensured fragmentation along ethnic and regional lines from the colony's inception.Turning to twentieth-century colonial developments, Part III takes aim at the volume's central question of how British rule impacted Nigeria. Every facet of life was affected by the colonial regime. Britain's efforts to extract resources and offload surplus production led to worsened inequality through high unemployment and decreased purchasing power. Social unrest proliferated as regional migration and urbanization intensified without government investment in sustainability. The spread of Britons’ language, religion, and values undermined indigenous counterparts and propagated myths of European supremacy. The effects of these impositions were only intensified by World War I and the Great Depression. Britain's failure to address Nigerians’ struggles catalyzed popular resistance to inequality and nationalist agitation for governmental representation.Part IV shows how World War II marked an essential turning point in Nigeria's story. Despite committing to the “moral cause” of fighting the Axis Powers, after 1945 Nigerians increasingly demanded independence because the War exposed the colonial regime's frailty and folly. The British Empire's wartime struggles illustrated that it was too weak to defend its dominions; they also evidenced that Britons had no claim to racial or cultural superiority. In the War's wake, tensions were exasperated because the government did not adequately compensate Nigerians for their military and economic contributions. Led by Western-style educated elites, anticolonialist sentiment became generalized and powerful. Neither divide-and-rule policies nor constitutional reform were sufficient to stabilize imperial control. On October 1, 1960, Nigeria attained national independence.The volume's final part offers a glimpse of today's legacies of colonialism. In terms of politics, Nigeria inherited colonial borders, institutions, and policies that fomented regionalism, ethnic strife, and a culture of corruption. In the context of economics, a century of extractive efforts undermined endogenous development thereby setting the stage for a neocolonial relationship between Nigeria and foreign capital. Finally, in terms of culture, displacements of local languages, knowledge systems, and religions obscure Nigerians’ historical contributions and denigrate Indigenous identities. Put simply, the enduring impacts of colonial rule in Nigeria are “monumental” (592).Understanding Colonial Nigeria deserves high praise for achieving the analytical sensitivity necessary to take the measure of “British Rule and Its Impact.” Historical change is consistently shown to unfold in a dynamic fashion. Although Britain's imperial capacities and priorities drove much of this story, Falola shows how precolonial diversity, global upheavals, and local resistance also played essential roles. For instance, British efforts to establish indirect rule in Eastern Nigeria through new warrant chiefs created unrest because the “process paid no attention to the traditions of precolonial existence” (227). During the late 1920s, global economic turmoil further aggravated this situation thereby helping to catalyze outbreaks of resistance such as the Aba Women's War. In turn, local action in Eastern Nigeria partially compelled administrative reforms during the 1930s resulting in local institutions that “resembled those from the precolonial era” (228).Falola deserves further recognition for adeptly condemning the innumerable ills stemming from colonial rule while maintaining strict empirical integrity. The positives of modern medicine, Western-style education, and transportation improvements are fairly acknowledged in this volume. By juxtaposition, this engagement with limited colonial “benefits” serves to highlight the exploitative extremes of the attending costs. Balance and circumspection enable Understanding Colonial Nigeria to approach the lofty goal of offering “valuable insights into the intricacies of our current situation and shedding light on how we can create a fair and inclusive future for all” (xv).The main criticism to offer is that the volume could be slightly more focused in execution. On occasion, the text broaches tangential subjects that raise more questions than are answered. For example, chapter 3’s passage on the early development of fusion foodways at Bonny and Old Calabar is overly terse. Greater selectivity could also have been beneficial regarding the volume's engagement with historiography. Although Part I appropriately positions the work as part of the larger movement to decolonize Africanist scholarship, at times the text gets drawn into overly niche debates such as “liberalist” versus Marxist views on economic stages of development (258). Because these asides do not complete a key function within an argument or narrative, simply omitting them would have offered slightly improved clarity across the volume.Understanding Colonial Nigeria is audacious and successful in equal measure. Toyin Falola answers the central question of how British rule affected Nigeria with a singular analysis. The volume's near-comprehensive nature means it has something to offer to any audience. Students will find it useful as a thorough introduction to the subject, and scholars may rely on it as a reference for a range of subtopics. The work will be especially welcome among those who seek to face the reality that Nigeria's present struggles largely stem from injustices done by colonizers.
K. James Tiede-Myers (Wed,) studied this question.