This chapter examines the beginnings of the use of ad hominem detention laws in West Africa, in an era during which Britain sought to expand its influence over areas in which the nature of its jurisdiction was often uncertain or contested. In the 1860s and 1870s, a number of African leaders were detained without any lawful authority, at the behest of local officials. In 1881, the Colonial Office began to insist that legal mandates for such detentions were necessary, in the form of ordinances. A raft of such ordinances followed. They were used for a number of purposes: in Sierra Leone, they were used to deal with African leaders who attacked areas under British protection, or engaged in local wars. In the Gold Coast, they were used for political purposes, notably to deal with agitators who threatened to unsettle British policy towards Asante. Detention by means of ordinance was used not only where the nature of British jurisdiction was in doubt, but also where there were doubts over whether convictions could be secured of those over whom there was jurisdiction. With little political pressure in the metropolis to counter such policy, detention by ordinance became routine.

The rise of standard forms of language for both the English- and the Spanish-speaking worlds is a development which benefits from contrast. Both languages spread overseas, with national standards arising during the later colonial period through a process of supraregionalization by which local varieties lost strong vernacular features and came to function as non-stigmatized, publically accepted varieties. However, the details of these developments are different and the cultural attitudes to varieties spoken in the source countries in Europe vary considerably, determining the ways in which standards are viewed and used in both the Anglophone and the Hispanophone worlds.