This chapter explains how the artificial creation of the Nigerian state – spurred principally by colonialism – drove colonial and eventually Indigenous officials to promote a system of regionalism to accommodate the creation of a federal system of government. In doing so, the concept of ethnicity was arbitrarily and crudely introduced to the complex and diverse patchwork of peoples inhabiting what would become Nigeria. Regionalism fostered self-interested political groups, whereby the individual interests of Nigeria’s three principal regions (North, West, and East), each dominated by one of three major ethnic groups (Hausa/Fulani, Yoruba, and Igbo), competed amongst one another for power, leading to extraregional conflicts. Complicating this system was the presence of many hundreds of other, much smaller, minority ethnic groups. The promotion of regionalism would ultimately give rise to ethnonationalism, in which Nigeria’s three largest ethnic groups were given precedence over minority groups, leading to intra-regional conflict. The concepts of regionalism and ethnicity would become inseparably intertwined and would significantly hamper decolonization and efforts at building a consolidated and equitable state.

British military institutions embraced a hierarchy backed by cruel physical punishment. The defiant soldier could face gauntlets, brandings, wooden horses, floggings, hangings, and firing squads. In certain places in British North America, though, White male colonists in militias and provincial armies enacted a more egalitarian organization - one that tilted authority toward the common soldier and curbed the most egregious aspects of military discipline. Such egalitarianism structured the Massachusetts Army in the American Revolution. But the supposed democratic rebellion would not feature a more democratic fighting force. When George Washington assumed command of the Massachusetts troops (soon known as the Continental Army), he made sure that hostile differences and bodily reprimand shaped the inaugural institutionalization of American state violence. “Every one is made to know his place and keep in it,” said the Reverend William Emerson of Washington’s army, “or be tied up and receive thirty or forty lashes according to his crime.”

This chapter describes the processes by which the foundations were laid for Canada to become one of the world’s great industrial nations. In this period, Canadians build more railways, encouraged massive immigration, and experienced growing class, ethnic, gender, religious, and regional tensions. Immigrants flocked to jobs in urban centres, developed Canada’s resource frontiers, and swamped the Indigenous populations of British Columbia, the Prairies (from which the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and an enlarged Manitoba were carved), and Yukon Territory (where gold was discovered in 1896). Meanwhile, Montreal and Toronto emerged as nation-dominating metropolises, and progressive civil society organizations agitated for social reforms that would smooth the rough edges of industrial capitalism. Although national unity was a fragile flower and the national policy based on immigration, railroad building, and industrial development was called into question from a variety of critics, both the nation and the national policy survived all challenges, including demands for annexation to the United States and Imperial Federation.

In 2017, Canada’s Stratford Festival dramatized The Komagata Maru Incident, Sharon Pollock’s play about Canada’s insistence on returning the ship Komagata Maru (KGM) and its passengers to India after it arrived in Vancouver in 1914. This chapter analyzes Pollock’s and Ajmer Rode’s plays about the KGM to examine, within a comparative framework, their differentiated investments in remembering this landmark moment in Canadian history. While Pollock’s play revisits the KGM to critique Canada’s treatment of its minorities, Rode’s play foregrounds the incident to comment on Canadian law in relation to British imperial interests in India, and the historical and ongoing regulation of national borders. Thus, while both plays challenge the official version of the KGM, Rode’s play situates the incident within a broader global history of empire as opposed to Pollock’s national focus on immigration and social exclusion. Nevertheless, by remembering the KGM from the space of time and distance, both plays provide frameworks for investigating colonial policies and attitudes, and for understanding the critical significance of Gurdit Singh’s first-hand account in Voyage of Komagata Maru or India’s Slavery Abroad. By refusing to forget the compelling story of the Komagata Maru journey, the plays function as powerful sites of historical commemoration.

This chapter examines the different kinds of humanitarian governance that emerged in the British Empire in relationship to the colonies. One kind was organized around human rights and believed that governance was designed to ensure that the local peoples were protected from settlers and could lead to thoughts of their equality and even independence. The other kind was organized around humanitarianism and the idea that alleviating suffering, rather than building empancipation, was the extent of humanitarian governance.

This chapter aims to enrich understanding of the production and reception of imperial discourses within the popular cultural imagination of romantic-era Ireland. It explores the ways in which popular fiction of the romantic period reflects and refashions the complex dynamic between British imperialism in the East and a nascent Irish nationalism. Whereas previous research in this area has centred upon the political, historical, and theoretical implications of Ireland’s imperial status, this chapter asserts that Ireland’s imperial role was both imagined and actualised within Irish popular culture via a diverse community of writers and readers. Taking the passing of the Act of Union as its departure point, it draws on a range of lesser-known and neglected texts, including a number of Minerva Press publications, in order to illustrate how popular fiction helped to cultivate and contest the intertwined discourses of union and empire within the political hothouse of post-Union Ireland.