The Briggs Plan is well known, but this chapter shows it instituted much more than a civil–military executive committee system and ‘population control’ through resettlement. Instead it aimed at a broader ‘geodemographic’ control of people and space, including ‘things’ such as food. It intended this to variously weaken insurgent–rural population links, provide ‘cover’ for the popultion to refuse what insurgents asked of them and create killing grounds as it forced insurgents to approach resettlements in more predictble ways. This chapter shows multiple individuals threatening resignation as the staggering scale of the plan – over 1 million were moved – tested people to the limit. It ends with promising signs but also still-high incident levels and rising concern in the wake of the killing of the high commissioner, Sir Henry Gurney, in October 1951. It also reminds us that even as geodemographic control was tightening and the first amenities for the resettled appearing, Briggs’s idea of clearing successive area was going nowhere. The operations were just too short, and too short of covering entire communist committee districts, to stop the MCP regenerating afterwards.

This chapter critically analyzes Nigeria’s status as one of Britain’s imperial possessions and its strategic importance during the war. This chapter shows that the mantra of the “people’s war” was effectuated through the systematic implementation of new policies and regulations, changes in existing economic policy, and specific regulations introduced to garner support for the war. This chapter then demonstrates how Nigerians were subjected to even greater demands to fight in what was seen as a glorious defense of civilization against barbarism. It presents how Nigeria was woven “into the tapestry of British warfare and Britain’s presence on the world stage as the foremost power,” to use Ashley Jackson’s expression. It argues that government policies during the war conveyed a highly paradoxical attitude toward colonized peoples: consistent with the goals of imperialism as an economic venture on one hand, and on the other, with the Allies’ commitment to the preservation of liberty and self-determination through specific wartime colonial policies.