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The history of Nigeria in the nineteenth century was dominated by the collapse of Old Oyo, the rise of the Sokoto Caliphate in the north and Ibadan in the southwest, the abolition of the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade (TAST), the institution of legitimate commerce in forest produce, Christian missionary evangelization, and the beginnings of British colonialism. This essay examines how three conjoined events—the Abolition, legitimate commerce, and Christianity—shaped Nigeria’s history during the long nineteenth century, culminating in British colonial rule. It highlights the role of the abolition of TAST and British attitudes in sustaining domestic slavery, the contribution of the Abolition and the institution of legitimate commerce to the British colonization of Nigeria, and the differential impact of Christianity and formal education on regions and communities across Nigeria.

Much historical and ethnographic research highlights a long relationship of humanity with psychoactive substances. However, most of this research has focused on prehistoric and ancient Europe, Asia, and the Americas, leaving Africa relatively neglected, and creating the misconception that African drug production, trade, and use is comparatively recent. This chapter shows instead that Africa has a long and important relationship with drugs as varied as khat, kola, datura, and iboga. It surveys Africa’s complex indigenous pharmacopeia of stimulants and intoxicants and their varied cultures of consumption, as well as substances that if external in origin, like cannabis, have been widely used for centuries across Africa. The chapter suggests a more nuanced and critical context for the contemporary threat illicit drug trades pose to the continent, in understanding Africa’s drug cultures in the longue durée.

This chapter uses the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Indicators to demonstrate where Nigeria, as an African nation-state, depends on African ethnonational-based institutions that run parallel to and/or are combined with Western institutions to support Nigerians beyond what is reflected in the global indicators. The analysis is set in Afrocentric terms to counter the false idea that African institutions are marginalized or non-existent in the twenty-first century. This chapter demonstrates Nigeria’s dual system's viability and the need to adequately recognize and support African institutions in collaboration with nation-state Western-style institutions through brief histories and descriptions of the African education, health, and welfare institutions.

Agriculture is the most critical economic activity in every society. It has historically remained the source of food that sustains the population and a source of wealth accumulation. This chapter looks at the intersection of environment, agriculture, and sustainable development. Whether it be crop production or animal husbandry, suitable agricultural production is dependent on a suitable and sustainable environment. This article looks at the link between the environment, agricultural productivity, and sustainable development. It also examines the link between contemporary agricultural crisis and environmental crisis and how both issues have posed a challenge to continued and future suitable, sustainable development.

Early states in the Americas integrated drugs and alcohol into their strategies of rule in diverse ways and to varying degrees. This chapter evaluates current scholarship on the relationships between rulers and drugs in the two main areas of primary state formation: Mesoamerica and the Andes, with a particular focus on the Maya, Aztec, and Incan states as they emerged and developed in the centuries before European contact. Key issues considered are the variable incorporation of shamanic ritual and hallucinogenic drugs into state cults centered on rulers, the effects of such integration on early state attempts to control consumption through sumptuary laws and other such “drug policies,” and the material and cultural dynamics of drug trade and use among the populations of these regions. The chapter ends on the historical legacies: the degree to which such politics and dynamics affected options of later colonial and national states in the Americas.

The chapter provides a brief survey of the major research developments in archaeology, linguistics, and the early history of Nigeria. It focuses on some important cultural areas, such as the northeast around the Lake Chad and the Hausa speaking region, the Niger and Benue valleys in central Nigeria, the southwest with the Yoruba–Edo cultural complex, and the southeast with the primary region today inhabited by the Igbo people. In addition to available archaeological and linguistic data and written Arabic texts, special attention is also given to oral traditions, material culture, and ritual, as these elements provide additional layers of historical memory shaping the historical trajectory of this region.

Architectural and infrastructural development engenders the built environment crucial to the day-to-day running of a country. Even more importantly, both are essential to the economic development of a nation. In Nigeria’s case, while the indigenous occupants had conceived their way of living and created their own built environment and local systems, the conquest and subsequent colonization of Nigeria led to the modern improvement of crucial infrastructural developments across the country. The origin, development, and factors of influence of some of these infrastructures are examined in this study. This study briefly examines the precolonial composition of Nigerian infrastructure and the impact of the two major religions, Christianity and Islam, on its architectural designs. In addition to explaining how infrastructural developments in banking, transportation—water, land and rail—electricity, and water supply were developed, the chapter posits that the economic exploitation of Nigeria and the administrative convenience of colonial personnel in Nigeria were the chief underlying motives for these developments, as evidenced by their heavy concentration in certain parts of Nigeria.

The chapter examines the implementation of colonial policies in the Nigerian region from the turn of the twentieth century to the middle of the century when Nigeria gained independence from Britain in 1960. It underscores three major transformations in the history of Nigerian colonial administration: first, the early period of colonial rule when British authorities imposed the indirect rule system on Nigerian communities from the early twentieth century to the 1920s; second, the period of colonial administrative reform when the indirect rule system was transformed from the late 1920s to the early 1940s; and finally, the period immediately after the Second World War from the mid-1940s to the late 1950s—when constitutional and local government reforms were undertaken as colonial Nigeria embarked on decolonization.

This chapter discusses colonial and postcolonial Nigerian historiography based on sampling the country’s extensive historical literature. It highlights the Eurocentric orientation, diversity of authors, and themes of colonial historiography. It also highlights the Africanist/nationalist posture, intellectual strands, topicality, decline, and contestations in postcolonial Nigerian historiography. It shows that although colonial and postcolonial historiography shares thematic diversity in common, they differ in several areas, including that while colonial historiography is offensive, postcolonial historiography is reactive; while colonial historiography is partly assumptive and partly empirical, postcolonial historiography is largely evidence-based; and while colonial historiography has largely waned; postcolonial historiography is blossoming.

The history of Nigeria’s colonial economy is intertwined with its political history. Colonization brought to power a government determined to “develop” the country by making it an exporter of crops attractive to global markets, on terms that favored Britain and western countries. A vast expansion of cash cropping, other opportunities for wage labor, and the end of slavery not only created a new kind of economy but also touched off radical social change and altered the most intimate of family and gendered relationships. Ongoing government attempts to foster and facilitate exports then contributed to inter-regional competition that ultimately undermined Nigerian democracy and led to the Nigerian Civil War.

This chapter explores the recent wave of revisionist research on the consumption and control of drugs in Asia from the nineteenth century onward. Examples from China, India, and across Southeast Asia suggest that familiar Asian drug narratives were often based on colonial-era racial or nationalist stereotypes. Monolithic actors such as the “Chinese government,” “British imperialists,” “Japanese invaders,” or “Indian princes” dissolve in the complexities of period and place. Fresh research stresses the agency of Asian customers and their tastes, habits, and practices, given sophisticated local cultures of consumption. Other histories portray a tangled competitive scramble to supply Asian markets for intoxicants and psychoactive drugs, where the lines between commerce and government control constantly shifted. Research has moved beyond opium into the twentieth century, when drugs like cannabis, morphine, heroin, and cocaine map onto Asia’s changing connections with global commodity flows. Ideas about Asian drug use informed the emerging international drugs regulatory system.

This chapter relates the British colonial conquest of Nigeria, which began with the removal of all visible oppositions to the imposition of British rule. It talks about the expansion and consolidation of British rule, and the use of diplomacy and coercion to reduce and contain potential opposition. It also mentions inaccessible areas in Northern Nigeria that offered pockets of stiff resistance to the British until the 1920s, located in some remote places with rough topography and decentralized political systems. The chapter looks at the series of events that occurred in Nigerian regions between 1885 and 1914 that have their roots in Europe since the early nineteenth century and were linked to Industrialization and the rise of New Imperialism. It highlights the colonial occupation of the Nigerian areas, the process of the occupation, and how Nigeria was incorporated under the British colonial empire.

This chapter examines the development of the international drug control system from its inception in 1909 through to the United Nations General Assembly on Drugs (UNGASS) in 1998. It begins by charting the shifting impact of US campaigns to export its prohibitionist ideology via international legal structures in the foundational years between the Shanghai Opium Commission and the outbreak of the World War II in Europe. US ideals and efforts remained ineffective during the League of Nations decades. The chapter then examines the rapid transformation of drug politics after World War II under the auspices of the United Nations and into the modern era of international drug control. This led to the bedrock of the global drug prohibition regime, the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, and the modern UN institutions around it. The chapter then traces the development and perpetuation of the international control system since the watershed 1961 treaty until UNGASS 1998.

Opium is central in the history of nineteenth- to early twentieth-century late imperial and modern China. Opium’s shift from herbal medicine into a larger narco-economy helped shape China’s foreign relations and economic life, affecting Chinese culture and the long struggle for modern China. This chapter puts together researched social history issues of who smoked opium, when, and why. By considering opium as a consumer item, historians “decriminalize” and depoliticize thinking about the drug and its consumption. Opium, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, began to appeal to millions of consumers from different regions and backgrounds as they indigenized, integrated, enhanced, and reinvented opium smoking as something Chinese. The demand for drugs’ rising consumption drove its rising trade, foreign conflicts, prohibition, and modern state “opium regimes.” Drug consumer culture offers a window on how a commodity and its consumption impacted the course of Chinese history.

This chapter, concentrating mainly on Anglophone cultures, examines the emergence and construction of drug use as a social, medical, and legal problem in the late nineteenth century, which was a prelude to their early twentieth-century legal restriction. Growing belief in the concept of “addiction” as an explanation of habitual drug use was central to this transformation and, for many specialists, addiction encompassed the principal social and medical harms born by narcotic drugs such as morphine or cocaine. The emergence of addiction as a medical or disease concept fostered the change from older moralistic models of the habits and harms inflicted by inebriation, those inherited from previous religiously inspired temperance movement anti-alcohol campaigns. It reflected and enhanced the growing power of the medical profession as reformers seized upon new “scientific” justifications for legal restrictions on the use of what became depicted as dangerous drugs.

Narratives of drugs in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) rely on Orientalist tales of drug consumption in the shadow of colonial encounters. Scholarship on drug history also marginalizes this region or it is done simply in terms of its connection to the West. Nonetheless, the MENA region has its own long rich history of drugs. Its geographical span, from Morocco to Iran, makes this fertile ground for study of multiple dimensions and varieties of drug cultures and histories. The chapter examines hashish in Morocco and Lebanon; opium in Iran and Iraq; heroin in Libya, Iran, and Palestine; and, finally, at amphetamine-type stimulants (captagon, methamphetamine, etc.) in the Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf. Diverse in drug consumption, the region also hosts different regimes of drug control and prohibition. The chapter surveys changing drug cultures amid the region’s epochal political events such as wars, occupations, civil conflict, and political revolts

This chapter analyses the alternation and contestations of dictatorship and democracy in Nigeria in the period 1966–1999. The period was dominated by military dictatorial rule that was vigorously challenged by civil society. The major plank for this was the abiding norm of military subordination to civil authority that made military rule an aberration, even when it could be justified. The main points of the struggles to restore democracy in the period under review are analyzed within the framework of democratic transition plans that provided the middle grounds for satisfying the democratic imperative. The triumph of democratic forces over those of military dictatorship are attributed to the resilience of civil society, the deconstruction of the myth of superior morality and attendant precipitate loss of legitimacy and social capital, and, finally, the intervening but supportive variables of economic decline and adjustment and the global democratic revolution that attracted tremendous support for the democratic struggles in Nigeria.

Effective organization of the security and welfare of society is the raison d’être of the modern state. It is the critical nexus of state–society relations, and the essence of national and human security in any social formation. In the manner in which it is composed and organized, the Nigerian state has not delivered on this mandate. Thus, it has created an enduring basis for insecurity, such as has manifested in different forms, as the country evolved from colonialism, through bouts of civil and martial rule, in the context of a monocultural economy of grossly limited productive capacity. The past twenty years of civil but limited democratic rule has not significantly enhanced the responsiveness of the Nigerian state to the aspirations of a preponderance of its society, especially the youths that constitute an overwhelming majority of the total population, yet grossly excluded from the nation’s economic and political processes. A re-casting of the governance structure is imperative to reposition and imbue the state with the capacity and commitment to deliver on critical social needs that can be the basis for national security.

This chapter explores the transformation of African drug production, consumption, and trade from the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. It centers on relationships between increasingly intrusive international trades and long-rooted regional systems of drug production and consumption. Drug products affected the Atlantic, Saharan, and Indian Ocean slaving systems, and the expansion of European power into the continent transformed and extended drugs in African societies. The late nineteenth century gave rise to one of the first transnational anti-drug campaigns, to suppress the West African liquor traffic; and the first international drug treaty, the 1890 Brussels Convention. Africans, like others, struggled over the definition and meanings of particular drugs, as medicines, stimulants, and poisons. In the late nineteenth century, medicinal commodities became part of a market revolution, competing with traditional products and subject to an emerging modern pharmaceutical regime. Drug regulation coincided with the larger project of colonial domination.

Contrary to myth, little evidence exists for extensive drug use in ancient India and South Asia. In the earliest texts, the Vedas, a plant beverage called soma was prepared for offerings to the gods and ritual consumption. The source of soma is now forgotten and the quest to identify it, from alcohol to mushrooms, best reflects modern theories of drugs and religion. Soma was a singular ritual drug yet with early substitutes. Research identifies alcohol as the sole ancient intoxicant consistently consumed and regulated in India. Betel arrived in the early first millennium and unlike alcohol was universally acceptable, if often classified as a perfume rather than intoxicant. Evidence for cannabis and opium use comes much later in the early second millennium CE. Yet once established, these drugs thrived, rapidly assimilated into traditional theories and practices. Notably newer drugs became incorporated into the ancient origin myth of alcohol, the prototypical intoxicant.