The Development of Wheeled Transportation in Osun Division of Southwestern Nigeria, 1900-1960

Wheeled transportation constituted a single factor that facilitated the incorporation of various African communities into the Europeans’ mercantile economy. In fact, it was an innovation in Africa where people had relied on some navigable waterways in the coastal areas, park animals in the tsetse flies free areas like Northern Nigeria and trekking along foot paths where human head porterage predominated. However, with the advent of the wheeled transportation technology, economic horizon became broader as people were provided with more profitable endeavors to engage themselves with. This essay attempts to analyze the development of wheeled transportation as a factor that was fundamental to the new developments in colonial Osun Division of Southwestern Nigeria. This is in a view to examine the diplomacies that surrounded road and rail construction in the division, Western Regional Government initiatives and the implications of the transportation technology on the divisional economy. The study depends on oral data gathered through interviews and archival materials as well as literatures that were considered relevant to the subject matter. Considering the shift of attention to the production of cash crops which were more profitable compared to the food crops, availability of new jobs as a result of the movement of the trading firms into the division and massive emigration of able bodied men and women in search of 78 Abiodun Ajayi more profitable jobs. There is therefore no doubt that wheeled transportation technology occasioned a transformation that was unprecedented in the colonial economy of Osun Division.

The Hokianga Dog Tax Uprising

Why was a seemingly mundane 19th-century fiscal measure—a tax levied on dog owners—met by Māori with widespread repudiation and an armed uprising? The significance of what is known as the ‘Hokianga Dog Tax Rebellion’ is often framed in terms of its apparent quashing by colonial forces in 1898, taken to signal the moment at which Crown sovereignty was finally imposed upon northern Māori. This paper questions the mainstream historical narrative, taking seriously the political stakes of taxation and locating the ‘dog tax’ within a disciplinary colonial regime that sought to interpellate Māori as financially and morally liable subjects. The dog tax was aimed at the protection of sheep, a central pillar of the early colonial economy, but was also viewed as a means of transforming Māori into citizen-subjects of the colonial regime. The doggedness with which colonial officials sought to enforce payment, and the steadfastness of Māori opposition to the tax, illuminate the highly politicised character of taxation in the colonial context. This article is an excerpt from Catherine Cumming’s The Financial Colonisation of Aotearoa, to be published by Economic and Social Research Aotearoa in late 2021.

The nexus of nationalism and internationalism: the journey of a “diplomat” after the galleons

After the galleons, Benito J. Legarda’s masterpiece on socioeconomic transformation after the galleon trade, has enriched our knowledge of the semi-open colonial economy in the 19th-century Philippine Islands, which witnessed the rise of nationalism at the end of that century. In this paper, I shed new light on the nature of the Ilustrados’ nationalism and their international activism by revisiting the life of the country’s “first diplomat”, Felipe Agoncillo, who battled in vain to achieve independence through a diplomatic channel. While class politics tends to be a focal point of the scholarly debate over the Ilustrados’ nationalism, this paper highlights the international dimensions of their advocacy. Agoncillo’s mission in the United States and Europe seems a reasonable option from our perspective, which has been shaped by the norm of modern diplomacy, but it was a risky adventure considering the overwhelming influence of imperialism. Why did Agoncillo conclude they had to send a mission? What kinds of negotiation strategies did they have? Combining Legarda’s global insights on the Philippines’ colonial economy with Agoncillo’s ideational and actual travel, this paper reveals how Philippine nationalism and internationalism created a nexus whose legacy exists in current Philippine diplomacy, one of whose achievements was the award of the arbitration case over the South China Sea in 2016.

The Role and Impact of Transportation to the Socio-Economic Development of the Colonial Government of Nigeria (1900 – 1960)

This study seeks to interrogate the motives, challenges, complexities and contribution of the transportation infrastructure to the socio-economic development of the colonial government of Nigeria between 1900 and 1960. Although a lot of literature exists on the contribution of transportation to the Nigerian colonial economy, yet, there has been no serious attempt to investigate the resistance to British demands which hurt the colonizer and of African initiatives to improve their socio-economic conditions through the transportation infrastructure. The impression is often created of a completely submissive colonial population simply complying with the colonial government instructions and demands for their produce, yet findings revealed that there were challenges and obstacles to the smooth-running of a result-oriented economic policy. The basic objective of this paper is to empirically articulate the extent to which the colonial transportation infrastructure was able to fulfill the motives/impact of these efforts to the socio-economic development and well-being of Nigerians at this period. Another objective of the work is to throw more light on the extent to which these infrastructures (transport) were able to promote or negate the interests and development of the colonial government of Nigeria. The study utilized both primary and secondary data and employed the simple descriptive analysis of the materials through the historical methodology. The work adopted the Solow Neo-classical Growth theory which attempted to measure the extent to which labor, capital and technology were able to influence the economic growth of Nigeria. On the whole, the work concluded that despite the claims of the British government of achieving the ‘dual mandate’ policy of ascertaining that commercial interests of both the home country Britain and the colony were guaranteed, yet to a greater extent the colonial government benefitted more to the disadvantage of the colony whose development was only marginal during this period.

Amazonian Atlantic: Cacao, Colonial Expansion and Indigenous Labour in the Portuguese Amazon Region (Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries)

A product native to the Amazon forest, cacao became the most important staple of the Portuguese Amazonian colonial economy from the late seventeenth until the mid-nineteenth century. Based on extensive research in Brazilian and European archives, this article analyses cacao exploitation in Portuguese Amazonia, examining its dual spatial dimension: the expansion of an agricultural frontier, and the expansion of an extractive frontier in the deep hinterland, with a particular focus on the role that Indian labour played in this development.

Voltaire’s Candide: From the Other Side of Civilization

Candide is generally anti-imperialist, anti-war, and anti-colonization, although Voltaire’s perspective of nature may reaffirm the idea that the state of nature is not enviable and civilization —indeed luxury probably dependent on colonial economy and horrors—seems preferable, although the happy conclusion is set in an Eastern agrarian-horticultural context that would not be luxurious unless luxury and European relationship to “nature” are redefined in the context of the Eastern garden. As well, Voltaire gave us an insight as to what he imagined was the symmetrical doubt about the humanity of the “other” from the oddly distorted mutual perspective at the time of the encounters between the Oreillons and Candide accompanied by Cacambo. The “natives” mate with monkeys (are mistaken for [disposable] monkeys); Candide and Cacambo are mistaken for prey (or harmful Jesuit animal species) to be feasted upon for dinner.