The local community in precolonial Igboland was not an isolated unit but, as the preceding chapters have shown, embedded in larger political, commercial, and ritual networks that connected communities and reconfigured their internal structures. The slave trade created groups of lower social status, and the Nri and Arochukwu spheres of influence linked local elite groups over wider areas and built new power centers locally. However, none of these external influences fundamentally encroached upon the character of precolonial Igbo communities as largely autonomous political entities. The rules defining belonging to a particular community were largely defined from within it—primarily in the generalized idiom of kinship, which also provided a mechanism for the incorporation of “strangers” and slaves. Still, while there were a number of itinerant specialists in crafts, commerce, and ritual who acted in a truly translocal environment, the extraordinary character of their status contrasts sharply with the high degree of local boundedness within which the large majority of people in precolonial Igboland lived.

The British colonial occupation of southeastern Nigeria around and after 1900 constituted a major break with the past. Colonial rule broke up some of the pre-colonial translocal networks of influence; it defined new boundaries and larger units and established new centers of power, especially with the institution of administrative chieftaincy, the institution of the “warrant chief.” Christian missions created their own communities of converts, with worldview and loyalties linked to places far beyond existing community boundaries. Opportunities for trade or work in places emerged which before had been out of reach to most people. Within a relatively short time span—between the turn of the century and the 1920s, depending on the locality—these new influences made themselves felt in powerful ways. Many of them were forced upon Igbo communities, sometimes in the face of considerable resistance. Others were welcomed and invited, because they appeared as useful in the given circumstances. None of them remained exclusively “external” for long, as they were appropriated and transformed by individuals, local elite groups, or even wider parts of the local population. From a regional history perspective, this part of the book looks at four main factors that transformed Igbo communities in the twentieth century: the state, in both its colonial and postcolonial versions; missionary Christianity; and Igbo ethnicity as a social, cultural, and political phenomenon.