This chapter traces the extant historical literature on the growth and development of party politics in colonial Nigeria. These parties were led by formidable personalities who played an essential role in the formation of national consciousness crucial for the formation of an independent Nigeria. While historians have classified it into four phases, the chapter proposes that the growth of political parties should be analyzed into two generational periods: the 1920s and 1930s, and the 1940s and 1950s. The former period is marked by the promulgation of the Clifford Constitution that led to the creation of the first-ever nationalist parties, such as the Nigerian National Democratic Party and The Lagos Youth Movement which, though claiming nationalist status, was, however, confined to the Lagos area. The latter commenced after the enactment of the Richards Constitution which witnessed the growth of regional political parties such as the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons, the Northern People’s Congress, and the Action Group all of which espoused ethnic nationalism. By engaging with historical works produced on nationalist movements in colonial Nigeria, the chapter places their value beyond the simplistic teleological development of politics of nationalism in Nigeria.

In early Islamic Egypt, “Arab-style” Greek (and later Coptic) letters employing religiously neutral monotheistic formularies were sent in the name of Muslim officials to Christian administrators. By analyzing old and new evidence of Egyptian Christians using this epistolary template, this paper argues that in the first decades of Arab rule, probably only a few beneficiaries of the new regime employed the “Arab-style” prescript in their letters written to other Christians to demonstrate their close connection to the new government and thus their social standing. Later, however, the “Arab-style” prescript became commonplace in communication between Christians and Muslims and among Christians only in everyday life. Thus, the religiously neutral template created by the conquerors for official top–down communication became a mechanism for facilitating not only the smooth functioning of administrative structures, but also, in the long run, the social cohesion of Christians and Muslims.

Remarkably, literature was the field where Darwinian thinking was immediately and warmly received. Charles Dickens’s weekly magazine, All the Year Round, at once published articles that gave detailed, sympathetic accounts of the theory of the Origin, and these were followed by writers using Darwinian themes in their fiction and poetry, Dickens himself using sexual selection to structure a key relationship in Our Mutual Friend. This continues to the present, when leading novelists like Ian McEwan and Marilynne Robinson use very different reactions to Darwin to mold their narratives.

This chapter continues the discussion on Nigeria during the interwar years (1918–1939). It shifts focus away from the reasoning behind colonial actions and paying more attention to their consequences for Nigeria. The interwar years in Nigeria were characterized by the onset of a decade-long economic depression caused by the global Great Depression and the increasing marginalization of local economic activity by private and colonial forces. This marginalization was promoted to increase the profitability of Nigeria’s growing extractive economy at the expense of native economic actors. This, along with the growing development of a new, educated, native elite, would see the growth of “official” indigenous organizations. The bulk of this chapter focuses on the development of these organizations such as the West African Students Union (WASU) or the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP), and details the growth of resistance movements fostered by the said establishments. They would demand greater representation in the colonial government, construct economic support groups, and attempt to end disparages in higher education. The chapter also explores alternative responses to colonialism, including the growth of organized crime and widespread regional migration. Finally, the chapter explores the different sociopolitical dynamics in Northern Nigeria.

The East India Dock Company followed and by 1810, there were also three on the south bank. Investment came predominantly from the capital’s wealthy mercantile and shipping communities, with slave trade interests strongly represented in both the West India and London companies. Wartime conditions failed to affect investment or impede the capital’s remarkable dock boom. The design for the downriver West and East India systems presented few problems, unlike the constricted setting of the London Docks. Labour shortages, bad weather and material scarcity affected construction by generally experienced contractors, but all docks were operating by 1806. The final costs exceeded estimates but only in the case of the London Docks by a large margin. Clearing housing and industries in Wapping burdened it with long-term debt. All the north bank companies chose a hierarchical employment structure. In contrast to strict supervision in the West India Docks, London replicated the traditional system on the quays, allowing its managers considerable autonomy. In their new regulated workplace, labourers faced restrictions, discipline and the loss of traditional perks.

This chapter explores the shifting dynamics between local authorities/peoples in the Niger area and the British government from 1914 to 1939. It builds upon the topics of colonial consolidation explored in Chapter 7, explaining on a macro level why the British government sought to impose these changes and exploring the impacts these changes had (social and economic). World War I and the interwar era significantly strained the British Empire, which necessitated a greater reliance upon its colonies. For Nigeria specifically, colonial officials sought to increase Nigeria’s profitability by promoting a streamlined, export-centered economy and a direct taxation system. Both of these changes required a more centralized, consolidated Nigeria, prioritizing large British firms and institutions at the expense of other foreign and local mercantile networks. Paradoxically, World War I diverted attention and critical administrative officials away from Nigeria, hampering the colony’s management and the implementation of these policies. Consequently, the colonial government relied on local draconian authorities where exploitation and improper native representation were commonplace. In response to these exploitative policies, this chapter will explain the growth of native-oriented political parties such as the NNDP

Although Chinese creoles formed the core of The Port’s identity, Mo Tianci came to preside over a tremendously diverse population additionally consisting of Qing sojourners and immigrants, Viet, Khmer, Siamese, Austronesians, and Europeans. They were multiconfessional, practicing Confucianism, Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity. He preserved the Cambodian noble hierarchy and official positions, while selectively adopting and adapting Sino-Viet institutions. In addition, he utilized religions and ethical systems, and devised some of his own practices for specific situations and depending on his constituency. Ultimately, he aimed to achieve two interrelated objectives: territorial expansion into the resource-rich hinterlands and the recruitment and retention of the population necessary to open up the new acquisitions.

After Mo Jiu’s death in 1735, his son Mo Tianci succeeded him as head of The Port. He established the Pavilion for Summoning Worthies to serve as an informal advisory body and literary society. Besides his trusted inner circle, he built upon his father’s earlier connections with Cochinchina and Qing gentry to jointly produce and publish anthologies of poetry and prose. The collaborations largely took place remotely, relying upon the same junks that circulated goods and labor throughout maritime East Asia. Tianci’s main goal was to build consensus among these translocal elites as being part of the same world order, while spreading word of his realm across the Sinosphere. Besides facilitating cultural exchange, anthologies such as “Idle Fishing at Sea Perch Creek” and the “Ten Verses of Hà Tiên” could lower transaction costs and enhance The Port’s importance as a commercial hub. Tianci’s focus on literature also conformed to the Heart-Mind school of Wang Yangming. This variant of neo-Confucanism promoted business and individual initiative.

The organicism–mechanism divide continued. Darwin was a Newtonian and a mechanist. Herbert Spencer was a Romantic and an organicist. Thomas Henry Huxley denied full status to natural selection. Louis Agassiz continued to deny evolution. Henry Walter Bates used selection to explain mimicry. Amateurs explained industrial melanism. All accepted the fact of evolution. Darwin was honored by being buried in Westminster Abbey.

This chapter studies how the ocean became a realm of human rights aspiration. It illuminates the emergence of an oceanic idea of human rights as an antislavery work, the invention of African Americans who had been held as slaves as well as of freeborn abolitionists. In antislavery thought, the ocean constituted not a space for traversing, creating wealth, or making war – of commerce and of empire – but a realm of natural human liberty. The chapter traces the origins of this idea to a slave rebellion aboard an American ship sailing on the Atlantic ocean in 1841– a coastwise slave trade voyage– and the conflict of laws caused by the rebellion. Out of this conflict, the chapter argues, emerged emancipatory doctrine that contributed to a burgeoning antislavery invocation of human rights while transforming a conception of the free sea that was centuries old.

In this chapter, a corpus of letters extracted from Imami Shiʿi hadith reports is analyzed to provide an overview of the system of imamic epistolary communications between imam and community members in Imami Shiʿism of the ninth century CE. The mechanisms by which letters reached the community are analyzed, including the mediation of agents (wakīl) of the imams. In particular, circular letters are looked at as illustrative of the ways in which the imam attempted to reach sections of his community beyond specific individuals, and the ways that these illuminate the distinctive aspects of Shiʿi community organization. The letters analyzed here indicate the existence of a relatively complex organizational web in the Imami Shiʿi community, whose efficacy was greatly dependent upon the trustworthiness of the individuals representing the claims of the imam to the constituencies in which they were embedded.

This chapter analyses the historical evolution of the creation and aesthetics of Nigerian artists during the colonial period through local musicians and actors. Moreover, the importance of oral traditions before the interaction with Europeans – such as proverbs, panegyrics, and rituals – incorporated Christianity through schools by the Nigerian elite and Western music and instruments. In the case of music, the chapter mentions how precolonial cultural traditions shaped it, the influence of ex-enslaved people from the Caribbean (such as Brazilians) who returned to the city of Lagos, and European contributions. Methodologically, the chapter follows musicians such as Fela Sowande, Victor Olaiya, and Bobby Benson. They, in different ways, integrated precolonial elements to create a national tradition that would create unity in the colonial period. In the case of theater, the chapter also mentions its historical evolution: from traveling theater to the work of Hubert Ogunde, Kola Ogunmola, and Duro Ladipo, as icons representing creativity and aesthetics, introducing Nigerian cultural elements to theater, such as Yoruba, Hausa, and Igbo language, myths, and stories, linking with Western traditions such as Christianity. The chapter concludes that the artists of the colonial period sought, through their musical and theatrical works, to preserve precolonial traditions.

This study explores a cluster of six letters preserved in the Cairo Geniza written by a Jewish father from Alexandria in the first half of the thirteenth century. The writer’s son ran away from home, abandoned the family shop and overall behaved in a way unbecoming for a young middle-class Jewish man. This study uses this little-studied cluster of documents to examine the ties that bound a young Jewish man to his family and community, including exchange of letters, economic considerations, familial bonds and religious expectations. The father’s letters offer a case study for approaching social ties and cultural expectations as dynamic and ongoing work performed by specific agents. The letters are useful for recovering an urban middle-class conception of masculinity prevalent in the medieval Islamic world that emphasized belonging to social networks and required men to uphold their responsibilities to those dependent upon them.

This chapter analyzes the United States’ relations with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam from 1975 to the present. The termination of war in 1975 brought conflict of a different sort. Washington retained the wartime trade embargo and rejected Hanoi’s demands for “reparations.” Vietnam ignored US requests to account for possible prisoners of war and missing in action (MIA) on its territory. Attitudes shifted in the 1980s. America’s détente with the USSR opened possibilities for Moscow’s ally, Vietnam. Now in dire straits economically, Hanoi’s new leaders revamped the nation’s stagnant economy and opened trade with numerous nations. Vietnam was sufficiently pressed that in the 1990s it bowed to harsh US demands for what was called normalization. Diplomatic relations and trade followed. Vietnam–US relations took an ironic turn in the new century. As China emerged the dominant power in East Asia and expanded into the South China Sea, America increased its military presence in the region and formed a strategic partnership with Vietnam. Wary of China, Hanoi needed US assistance. But it feared dependency on its former enemy. Americans still condemned Vietnam’s authoritarian government and human rights’ abuses. Both seemed content with a relationship a Vietnamese diplomat called the “Goldilocks Formula”: “Not too hot, not too cold.”

Chapter Two explores the declaration of colonial peace through the amnesty offered to rebels in the Queen’s Proclamation of 1858. While this document has already piqued the interest of historians and political theorists of liberalism and “indirect rule,” I turn to this document as an instrument of post-conflict resolution. Comparing and contrasting the variety of strategies used by the state to temper forgiveness, this chapter tracks the creation of an uneven hierarchy of colonial subjecthood organized along lines of relative loyalty and disloyalty. In exploring the wider importance of amnesty at this juncture, this chapter examines this offer as a founding political bargain presented to the defeated. This promise of mercy, in this instance, had been contingent on the full surrender of Indian political agency.