This paper examines the origin of the Askiya dynasty in Songhay, with an emphasis on the alliance between the militant ‘ulamā’ and the commanders of the northwestern province during the reign of Sonni 'Alī (1464–1492). The inadequacy of Sonni 'Alī's policy for dealing with the polarization in the cities, the increased role of the officers in these political matters, the rise of militant Islam and the division of the army: all these contributed to the downfall of the Sonni dynasty and the subsequent transfer of power to a regime inspired by Islam. The conflict in Timbuktu to which the ‘ulamā’ gave a religious justification precipitated the revolution. This revealed the importance of Islam as a factor of division, a motor for social action and political change. Indeed, many Muslim leaders had come to see themselves as members of a community worthy of ruling a predominantly non-literate country governed by a non-Muslim royalty. But for this they had to rely on the officers, and in particular Muḥammad Ture who, as a high official connected with both the main warring factions, could fulfil all the conditions for success. His victory introduced a new imperial era in the history of Islam in the Western Sudan.

During the early and middle years of the nineteenth century a Creole elite emerged on the island of Fernando Po. The origins of this lay in the fact that for the thirty years after 1827 the island was at the centre of European political and economic interests in the Gulf of Guinea. The short-lived British occupation of Fernando Po, 1827–34, established the town of Clarence and brought to the island a number of settlers, and in particular ‘liberated Africans’, freed from slave ships captured by the Royal Navy. The situation they faced in Clarence and the treatment they received, not least once the British government withdrew and a succession of British traders attempted to run the town, led to the emergence of a homogeneous society out of the various ethnic groups they comprised. This society was to be transformed by the development of a palm oil trade on the island, particularly during the 1840s. This led to the emergence of a group of middlemen between the Bubi producers of the interior and the European traders who collected oil from Clarence, and concurrently, to the stratification of Clarence society into a trading elite and a group of labourers and servants. This trading elite was attracted to the work of the Baptist Mission in Clarence after 1841, and in particular saw the value of the Mission in giving itself a distinct identity. Over time this elite and the Baptists drew apart, but this was not before the interrelation of social stratification with the work of the Mission had produced a class of Creoles whose descendants – the Fernandinos – still survive as a distinct group in Equatorial Guinea today.

Although Southern Rhodesia's settler minority won responsible government from Britain in 1923, it was on terms circumscribed by the interests of metropolitan accumulation. As the dependent partner, Southern Rhodesia was obliged to accept constitutional provisions seeking to guard against initiatives which might disturb that process. Consequently, the settler state found itself hamstrung when it tried to gain some say over how the railway system operated. It was even less successful when it turned its attention to base mineral mining, where a handful of large companies did pretty much as they pleased. Efforts to find overseas markets for cattle and tobacco were also unsatisfactory. Neither the state nor settler producers could obtain the terms they wanted. Accumulation proceeded on terrain designed and dominated by imperialism.

Radical historians criticizing leaders of the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union have focused on their petty bourgeois origins. This article argues that although most organizers of the later 1920s did not derive from the working class, neither were they able to base themselves securely within the petty bourgeoisie. Instead, like lower-middle-class Africans in general, they were being forced ever further from the white bourgeoisie and ever closer to the black masses. This was apparent in all spheres of life – economic, political, cultural, social and ideological – and was also increasingly evident in protest. As racially oppressed men and women subject to proletarianization and engaged in struggle, ICU leaders do not fit neatly into schemas which stress the bourgeois nature of the petty bourgeoisie.

Between 1900 and 1925 the British Government evolved a policy concerning agricultural development in West Africa by which expatriate-owned plantations, especially for oil palms, were excluded. This prohibition created as many problems as it solved, for the Nigerian Government in particular faced the problem of competition in the international palm-oil and kernel market from plantations in South-east Asia and the Belgian Congo. In the 1920s the Nigerian Government went to considerable effort to entice British capitalists to invest in palm-oil processing (but not production), but to no avail. In the 1930s the Government concentrated on trying to rehabilitate the oil-palm industry by encouraging the establishment of small, native-owned plantations, improving native methods of oil extraction and controlling the quality of palm-oil and kernel exports. This policy was beset with difficulties of finance, inadequate research and the effects on land tenure systems. It failed, and the Nigerian palm-oil export industry lost its place in the world market.

British trusteeship does not appear to have been a positive policy as far as economic development was concerned. It created a dilemma which the colonial authorities were not equipped to solve in the economic and political context of the inter-war period.