A colony in crisis: Northern Nigeria, British colonialism, and the Great Depression.

Abstract

The dissertation renders a comprehensive account of the economic, social, and political implications of the Great Depression of the 1930s for colonial Northern Nigeria, focusing particularly on how various groups of Northern Nigerians---farmers, workers, traders, chiefs, and the embryonic educated elite---reacted to the economic crisis and to the economic recovery policies crafted by the British colonial government to combat it. I analyze how the depression, its impact on Great Britain, the colonial power in Northern Nigeria, and Britain's quest for recovery prompted new economic and political policies in Northern Nigeria, policies that effectively transformed the practice and rhetoric of British colonialism in the region, as well as the nature and scope of grassroots struggles over resources and opportunities. Using a variety of data (oral interviews, vernacular publications, colonial reports and correspondences, memos, diaries, etc.), I show how the financial strain of the depression, the state's self-cushioning new revenue schemes, and the near-complete cessation of infrastructural development forced a retreat from the standard paternalistic rhetoric of British colonialism, complicated economic struggles and power relations at the colonial grassroots, and empowered the dissenting voices of local elites. The dissertation demonstrates that, contrary to the standard narrative of a wholly state-directed economic exaction during the depression, the unprecedented exploitation of the peasantry and of laborers during this period resulted as much from the state's emergency austerity policies as from the maneuverings, self-interested calculations, and shady practices of African, Arab, and European merchants and employers---not to mention the opportunism of chiefs who felt empowered by the state's declaration of an economic and political emergency. One of the major arguments of the dissertation is that, by transforming chiefs into agents of state economic recovery, the implementation of the emergency economic recovery policies undermined the British administrative policy of Indirect Rule. I argue that the ruthless pursuit of economic recovery as well as the increasingly visible infrastructural and social failures of a financially distressed colonial state enabled the emergent Northern Nigerian educated elite to launch an anti-colonial rhetoric, discursively harass the colonial bureaucracy, and make material and ideological demands on an avowedly bankrupt state. Another important argument is that the depression and the colonial state's efforts to cushion itself from its effects inspired a reconfiguration of polities in Northern Nigeria that were previously administered half-heartedly as economic and political peripheries. I argue that the British effort to reconstitute one such periphery of the periphery, Idoma Division---a remote, food crop producing Division in Northern Nigeria---gave rise to a depression experience which was remarkably more dramatic and violent than that of the export crop producing, centralized polities of the Northern Nigerian colonial mainstream.