Between 1866 and 1886 Arabized traders from the Nile River trafficked in slaves and ivory in the Mangbetu region of what is today north-eastern Zaire. These Nile traders opened the first direct long-distance trading contacts in the area. European travellers present during the period wrote accounts giving the impression to some modern historians that the traders did extensive damage to several small, welldeveloped Mangbetu kingdoms. These accounts do not furnish an accurate picture of the trader impact on the Mangbetu. The Mangbetu system of rule was less developed than the travellers supposed. At that time Mangbetu rule was still based largely on personality and kinship and not on bureaucracy, tribute, commercial monopoly, divine kingship, or any other institution often associated with strong African kingdoms. Moreover, the trader influence was weaker than the travellers supposed because the intruders were newcomers, operating at a great distance from the Khartoum market, who remained only a short time. Only from 1881 to 1885 did the Egyptian government have some success in regularizing the trade and subduing rebellious rulers. In early 1886 all northerners withdrew from the Mangbetu area as a result of the Mahdist crisis in the Sudan. At that point the Mangbetu kingdoms, and kingdoms built on the Mangbetu model, re-emerged relatively unchanged by the trader experience.

It has been argued that the conquest of disease, particularly malaria, preceded and facilitated the spread of the European empires in Africa. The French experience shows the contrary. Even into the twentieth century surprisingly little use was made of quinine; death rates from malaria remained high. Yet the French empire expanded steadily. As the empire expanded, more and more use was made of indigenous troops. Africans recruited within the conquered territories were sent to conquer new territories. As the number of European combatants fell, so did the European death rate. Then, once the colonies were subjugated, communications and living conditions improved, making life healthier for Euopeans. The lowering of the death rate must therefore be ascribed to the expansion of the French empire rather than to the achievements of medical science.

Repatriated slaves and Christian missionaries introduced Christian marriage into colonial Lagos, and spread new values about polygyny and conjugal relationships and roles. Women among the educated elite strove to marry in church and conform to foreign marital norms, in part because Christianity, European education, and colonial legal and economic changes had altered their opportunities. When they embraced Christian marriage, elite women sacrificed the autonomy and economic independence of illiterate Yoruba women for the privileges associated with membership in the elite. As elite women experienced disappointment and vulnerability created by trying to conform to foreign ideals, some began rethinking aspects of Christian marriage, particularly the wife's economic dependence.

Several recent studies have examined the impact of the First World War on the people, and rulers – alien and indigenous - of West Africa. Diverse societies responded in a variety of ways to a situation in which extraordinary demands from the colonial rulers - of which direct military recruitment was only one - were often accompanied by administrative and military contraction at the local level.

This paper examines the way in which wartime conditions in the Zouaragu (Zuarungu) and Bawku districts of what is now upper Ghana exposed the weakness of the indigenous administrative structure recently constructed by the British. Here, in many instances, chiefs had been imposed, or at least had had their powers qualitatively changed and substantially increased, in societies that were traditionally organized on a kinship basis. The War seemed to provide an opportunity for an overthrow of this structure, which had enabled many of the chiefs to establish harshly exploitative relations with their subjects. An upsurge of disobedience to chiefly orders was followed in the Bongo area by a land dispute which flared into disturbances in which a constable was killed. These disturbances and an incident in the neighbouring Bawku District were taken as a sign of revolt and ruthlessly crushed by a local administration intent on teaching an unforgettable lesson.

Governor Clifford in Accra anatomized the inadequacies of administrative control and condemned his officers' brutal response to the disturbances, but offered little in the way of suggestions for the reform of the chieftaincy system despite clear indications that local hostility was directed more against it than against colonial rule per se. Neither were reform proposals forthcoming from the Northern Territories administration. Thus the severity of the British response to popular opposition to chiefly power was a factor in enabling some chiefs to continue as ‘spoilers’ rather than ‘fathers’ of their people even after the introduction of formal Indirect Rule in the 1930s had nominally broadened popular participation in local administration.

Following the Anglo-Egyptian conquest of the Sudan, British unwillingness either to annex the territory or to allow its reincorporation with Egypt was given expression in the Anglo-Egyptian Agreement of 1899, under the terms of which Britain and Egypt were to rule jointly. But the ' Condominium Agreement' was in reality a device by which Britain managed and Egypt paid for the Sudan's administration. The central figure in that administration was the Governor-General, who, although formally appointed by the ruler of Egypt, was the nominee of the British government.

The development of the Governor-Generalship from its inception until the resignation of Sir John Maffey in 1934 owed less to the formal arrangements set down in the Condominium Agreement than it did to relations between the Sudan Government and successive British representatives in Cairo, and to changes in the Governor-General's own position within the Sudan Government. He remained pre-eminent throughout the period under review, but by 1934 his relative independence of Cairo was balanced by the power, within the Sudan Government, of a Council of senior officials.