This chapter explores the shifting dynamics between local authorities/peoples in the Niger area and the British government from 1914 to 1939. It builds upon the topics of colonial consolidation explored in Chapter 7, explaining on a macro level why the British government sought to impose these changes and exploring the impacts these changes had (social and economic). World War I and the interwar era significantly strained the British Empire, which necessitated a greater reliance upon its colonies. For Nigeria specifically, colonial officials sought to increase Nigeria’s profitability by promoting a streamlined, export-centered economy and a direct taxation system. Both of these changes required a more centralized, consolidated Nigeria, prioritizing large British firms and institutions at the expense of other foreign and local mercantile networks. Paradoxically, World War I diverted attention and critical administrative officials away from Nigeria, hampering the colony’s management and the implementation of these policies. Consequently, the colonial government relied on local draconian authorities where exploitation and improper native representation were commonplace. In response to these exploitative policies, this chapter will explain the growth of native-oriented political parties such as the NNDP

This chapter analyses the historical evolution of the creation and aesthetics of Nigerian artists during the colonial period through local musicians and actors. Moreover, the importance of oral traditions before the interaction with Europeans – such as proverbs, panegyrics, and rituals – incorporated Christianity through schools by the Nigerian elite and Western music and instruments. In the case of music, the chapter mentions how precolonial cultural traditions shaped it, the influence of ex-enslaved people from the Caribbean (such as Brazilians) who returned to the city of Lagos, and European contributions. Methodologically, the chapter follows musicians such as Fela Sowande, Victor Olaiya, and Bobby Benson. They, in different ways, integrated precolonial elements to create a national tradition that would create unity in the colonial period. In the case of theater, the chapter also mentions its historical evolution: from traveling theater to the work of Hubert Ogunde, Kola Ogunmola, and Duro Ladipo, as icons representing creativity and aesthetics, introducing Nigerian cultural elements to theater, such as Yoruba, Hausa, and Igbo language, myths, and stories, linking with Western traditions such as Christianity. The chapter concludes that the artists of the colonial period sought, through their musical and theatrical works, to preserve precolonial traditions.

This chapter discusses the topic of gender, gender relations, and the history/roles of women in Indigenous and colonial Nigeria. It will also explore the regional differences in women’s experience from the Islamic north to the relatively egalitarian status of Igbo women in the southeast. While still mainly occupying subordinate roles, many women in precolonial Nigeria could wield significant official and unofficial power. With the onset of colonialism, women’s lives were relegated to the private sphere, with direct and indirect barriers excluding women from significant public roles. Finally, the chapter chronicles colonial Nigerian women’s widespread response and agency during this period, detailing several noteworthy individuals.

This chapter explores the history of urbanization in Nigeria, focusing primarily on the colonial era and, to a lesser degree, precolonial Nigeria in areas that hosted large, Indigenous urban centers like Ibadan or Kano. This chapter will argue that the primary factor that pushed Nigeria toward urbanization was colonialism, driven primarily by economic interests. This development was informed by Nigeria’s unique geographic, social, and political conditions, the specifics of which will be showcased through the exploration of Nigeria’s most prominent cities. Finally, the chapter will detail the urban policies of colonial officials and the actual development of these cities, along with the challenges that arose from uneven, exploitative practices. These issues would mire Nigeria’s urban landscape with poor planning, crime, poverty, and numerous other challenges which continue to plague the nation today.

Chapter 1 explains the theoretical framework deployed throughout the book, largely drawn from the companion volume, Unearthly Powers. Above all, this means explaining the two forms of religiosity – immanentism and transcendentalism – and how they related to each other. While immanentism is a default or universal strand of human life, transcendentalism defines what is distinctive about the religions of salvation that emerged from the Axial Age of the first millennium BCE. These world religions also contained an immanentist element, however, even as they produced reform movements that insisted on the transcendentalist dimension. These modes also gave rise to two different means by which rulers could be sacralised: divinised kingship (immanentism) and righteous kingship (transcendentalism). The chapter then fleshes out a tripartite model for ruler conversion: (1) religious diplomacy often first induced rulers to favour foreign missionaries; (2) immanent power, or supernatural assistance in this life, tended to be crucial in convincing them to make a change of allegiance, and (3) the Christianisation of their realms was linked to its capacity to enhance their authority. Lastly, the themes of cultural glamour and intellectual appeal are introduced.

Tracing the trajectory of journalism fields in Africa from the 1700s to the early to mid-2000s, this chapter highlights the tensions between the political and journalism fields in postcolonial Africa. It focuses on the numerous ways political fields sought to assert control over journalism through colonial-era laws and using their financial muscle to cajole the fields. It shows that ideas about the role of journalism fields were contested both within and outside the field, with some in the field agreeing with the political field with regard to a limited approach to journalistic freedoms. It shows how political elites were keen on controlling journalism fields upon independence primarily because they were aware of the fields’ enormous potential to challenge their legitimacy after using them to push for independence.

Why did the United States establish an early American Empire in the Pacific (1856-1898)? This chapter first discusses the conventional wisdom that focuses on the role of naval power, trade with China, and missionaries. It shows that these explanations are unable to explain patterns of American imperialism in the Pacific. It then introduces a theory of entrepreneurs and highlights the contributions that an entrepreneurial theory makes to International Relations scholarship, including to theories of empire, territorial expansion, and contemporary struggles for recognition for indigenous peoples in the Asia-Pacific.

This chapter reconstructs the dynamics of the initial encounter between the British and the question of mental health illness in Palestine into the 1920s. Far from recapitulating a familiar narrative about the colonial introduction of psychiatry as a moment of rupture, it instead offers a multi-layered account of the opening of the first government mental health hospital at Bethlehem, in order to highlight how the British were in fact latecomers to an ongoing history of psychiatry in Palestine. Well before the British occupation of 1917, Palestinians had recourse to a range of medical and non-medical options for the management of the mentally ill, and those existing understandings, experiences, and institutions crucially shaped how the British responded to mental health illness across these formative years. As well as tracing the establishment of a key institution, this chapter also introduces a central figure in the history of psychiatry in mandate Palestine: Dr Mikhail Shedid Malouf.

The seventh chapter studies how Blake’s poem Milton (c.1804) reconceives key aspects of epic tradition as it refigures missionary work as a metaphor for promoting freedom from the limitations of imperial discourse. Showing how literal missionary work can assist empire by holding people in states of subjection, Blake more abstractly repudiates the limitations that Equiano addresses concretely. I argue that Blake locates in the tensions between missionary work and empire the resources to oppose imperialism. While some of Blake’s rhetoric resembles that of actual missionaries and imperialists of his day, I suggest that Blake works from within such orthodox discourses to undermine them. The unresolved contradictions in Blake’s Milton – both in his use of the epic genre and in his appeals to religious and imperial rhetoric – heighten the challenge that he poses to the stable circumscriptions of imperial discourse.

Chapter 2 augments this framework by surveying the history of the evangelical revival, emphasizing the anxious relationship between missionaries and empire. I examine the growth of missionary societies, their conflicts with empire, and their descent into the underworld of collusion with imperialists. I highlight key moments in this history, including the Vellore Mutiny, which raised concerns about evangelism among more secular exponents of empire, and the subversive work of Johannes Van der Kemp among the Khoi in South Africa. The chapter concludes with a close examination of two brief epics composed by missionary propagandists in the 1790s, Thomas Williams and Thomas Beck. These poems reveal the early conceptual friction between evangelism and imperialism, but they also indicate the assumptions that would enable the two projects to be aligned in the nineteenth century.

My fifth chapter extends my investigation of how epic could facilitate the imagining of a coordination of evangelism and imperialism and also provide, through tensions inherent in the genre, space to critique of the developing ideology of Christian imperialism. I examine Robert Southey’s Madoc as a cautious depiction of Christian conversion: even as Southey regards it as uplifting and beneficial, he expresses wariness about evangelism’s potential to sanction injustice. Conveying the remnants of Southey’s misgivings about the tyrannical potential of established religion, along with his suspicion about the overly enthusiastic zeal of many missionaries, Madoc traces similarities between Christians and non-Christians as a technique to affirm colonial authority, even as it strives to contain the tensions summoned by this strategy. Through his revisions of the epic genre, Southey advocates a need continuously to reform Christianity, empire, and epic, and so continuously to purge them of a tyrannous potential that he believed accompanied them.

After having discussed the tactics of epic writing in the 1790s and early 1800s, I return to 1789 in my sixth chapter in order to examine the subversive implications of Olaudah Equiano’s anticipation of the Romantic epic revival. Although his Interesting Narrative (1789) is not an epic, it borrows several aspects of the epic form in order to associate Equiano at once with both colonizers and the colonized. Mixing epic with autobiography, conversion narrative, and travel writing, the formal liminality of Equiano’s account amplifies his presentation of himself as a hybrid figure in terms of race and religion, allowing him to promote to his readers not merely Christianity, but a broader conception of identity that challenges the conceptual basis of slavery and imperialism. Drawing on the literary resources of his colonizers’ culture, Equiano ultimately uses his position as ‘other’ to promote in his Narrative a cosmopolitan Christian identity that transcends the categories of nation and race while revealing the flaws in the discourse of both evangelism and empire.

Chapter 1 establishes a framework for understanding how the Romantic epic served as a vital literary form for addressing the tensions raised by the evangelical revival and the development of ideologies of Christian imperialism. Identifying epic poetry as an inherently conflicted genre that at once embodies reverence towards tradition and rebellion against it, the chapter investigates unique tensions in the Romantic epic that suspend it between an exterior focus influenced by the classics and an interior orientation inspired by Milton. Examining the conflicts within and between evangelism and the secular civilizing mission, the chapter argues that tensions within the epic genre make it useful for addressing similar anxieties exposed by the development of Christian imperialism.

The book concludes with a chapter that links my argument to the poetic theory and epic practice of the canonical Romantics. Situating Wordsworth’s Prelude and Byron’s Don Juan in the epic revival reveals how they participate in the trends of the period by addressing the tensions of the evangelical turn of empire. The Prelude elaborates the tradition of epic poetry that broadly affirms assumptions of British imperialism while resisting and seeking to temper its worst aspects. Don Jua, on the other hand, may be read as an extension of more subversive uses of the epic genre, attempting oppose imperialism – or at least many of its forms – by decrying the very idea of transforming others. Yet in Byron’s rejection of conversion, and in his embrace of a subjectivity made thinkable by the increasing secularization of the world, he offers an alternate path for reclaiming a sense of wholeness, one grounded in doubt and critical thought.

This chapter offers a different take on the standard teleological story of Christianization in the Lushai Hills by focusing on what the missionaries themselves deemed an utter failure: their first decade of mission work. It views the earliest foreign missionaries to the Lushai Hills as uplanders did: first, as ‘sap vakvai’ - strange and insignificant wanderers; and, later, as ‘zosap’ - usable and incorporable newcomers, asking not what foreign missionaries wanted from highland people, but what highland people wanted from missionaries. The weakness and vulnerabilities of foreign missionaries opened up space for a first generation of young people with sensibilities spanning the Lushai Hills District and the globe. Upland populations became interested in Christianity - a new yet combinable spiritual power - as well as the knowledge dispensed on the mission compound because they were completely and inherently involved in its interpretation and dissemination. Everyday technologies, the studies and movements of students, regional meetings of nascent Christian groups, and ‘celebrations’ of empire began synchronizing time and both connecting and circumscribing space, all with profoundly far-reaching and unpredictable effects. Maps, schools, and the harmonization of space and time would help spark ideas about a wider, more integrated ‘Mizo’ identity. Children, adolescents, and youth were not only critical partners but also often operated in networks completely unmediated by the white missionaries, in channels of circulations that generated important redefinitions of space, time, and ethnicity in the uplands.

Christian missionaries in Morocco – who were present from the 1890s to the 1970s – were complete failures at making converts. But their influence was still significant. Much admired to this day, the American missionaries in particular submitted insightful comments on the country, brought medical aid and technology to many areas of the country, and professed a form of Christianity that sought to set an example rather than denigrate local culture. In what is admittedly a small element in the encounter with the West, it remains striking that so many Moroccans continue to speak well of their contacts with the missionaries and thereby give voice to their own culture of inclusiveness.

The narrative begins with the establishment of the American Presbyterian Mission in northwestern Iran. American missionaries discovered Iran at a moment of cultural and social crisis after the Russo-Persian Wars. Iran grappled with a mixed religious environment, which, while dominated by Shia communities, had accommodated peoples of different faiths, including Zoroastrians, Jews, and Christians. The relationship with the new Babi group and its offshoot Bahaism proved more problematic because of the unique challenges they posed.

Under Mongol rule and the Pax Mongolica, Song China became part of the much wider world of the Mongol Empire. Although it was split into four khanates in 1260, Qubilai consolidated control over Goryeo and Dali and, where conquest failed (as in Dai Viet, Kamakura Japan, and Java), pursued diplomatic and commercial relationships, especially on the Indian subcontinent. Mongol rule integrated China into an overland global economy parallel to the maritime one in the South Seas and the Indian Ocean. Ceramic production under the Mongols played a major role in maritime trade, while the blue-and-white porcelain seen in the Yuan exemplifies contact across Eurasia. Textile production likewise stimulated commerce and contact across Eurasia. Silk production long antedated this era, but patterns and designs produced under the Mongols exhibit Central Asian influences, as silk from China made its way westward as far as the Mediterranean and beyond. The Mongol era dietary, A Soup for the Qan, illustrates Eurasian interconnections visible through the lenses of food and medicine. Along with steppe shamanism, the Mongols favored Tibetan Buddhism, but they also implemented policies of official toleration toward recognized faiths (including Eastern Syriac and Roman Catholic Christianity), creating one of the most ecumenical societies in world history.

Through four regimes between 1815 and 1870, the French would regularly invent new rationales and purposes for empire. A domestic crisis of legitimization led to the invasion of Algeria in 1830. So began a French settler colony in which barely half the settlers even came from France. The revolutionaries of 1848 annexed the colonies, making them national territory. While chattel slavery was legally abolished throughout the empire, annexation meant different things in different places. Colonial incoherence continued. Missionaries fostered and legitimized imperial expansion, though the imperial state never found them completely reliable. Military entrepreneurs in Senegal and Indochina had their own agendas, and did Emperor Napoleon III, who envisaged an “Arab Kingdom” in Algeria. He also sought to expand the empire indirectly, through a disastrous scheme to place a Habsburg on a Mexican throne. The prison colony provided another brutal avenue of colonial expansion. French imperial capitalism generally prospered, though the French were so outmaneuvered by the British after building the Suez Canal that they overshadowed the French role altogether. By 1870, the whole of the French empire still somehow seemed less than the sum of its parts.