This chapter continues the discussion on Nigeria during the interwar years (1918–1939). It shifts focus away from the reasoning behind colonial actions and paying more attention to their consequences for Nigeria. The interwar years in Nigeria were characterized by the onset of a decade-long economic depression caused by the global Great Depression and the increasing marginalization of local economic activity by private and colonial forces. This marginalization was promoted to increase the profitability of Nigeria’s growing extractive economy at the expense of native economic actors. This, along with the growing development of a new, educated, native elite, would see the growth of “official” indigenous organizations. The bulk of this chapter focuses on the development of these organizations such as the West African Students Union (WASU) or the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP), and details the growth of resistance movements fostered by the said establishments. They would demand greater representation in the colonial government, construct economic support groups, and attempt to end disparages in higher education. The chapter also explores alternative responses to colonialism, including the growth of organized crime and widespread regional migration. Finally, the chapter explores the different sociopolitical dynamics in Northern Nigeria.

Every country, every subnational government, and every electoral district has a designated population. Some are large and some are small. Yet in existing empirical work, population is usually treated as a background factor. In this preface, the present book’s focus on scale effects is outlined and motivated. By means of a brief comparison of the illustrative examples of the United States and Malta, it is argued that population size influences politics in a variety of ways. Since it is difficult to reach a determination about the role of scale for particular cases, this book examines scale effects at a general level, focusing on universal rather than particular causal effects. While a venerable tradition of political thought and scholarship suggests that scale is an obstacle to democracy and good governance, our findings suggest that scale has both positive and negative effects. The final section of the preface lays out the structure of this book, highlighting the themes discussed in each of the following chapters.

This chapter explores differences of scale as manifested in political communities around the world. The first section of this chapter takes stock of scale differences across a variety of political units, highlighting the extraordinary demographic variation on display across nation-states, municipalities, and electoral districts. Next, we demonstrate the extreme skewness that characterizes most differences of scale. In the third section, we examine differences of scale across different organizational types, showing that political communities often contain greater size differences than other sorts of organizations. In the final section, we show that size affects our choice of subjects, with larger communities garnering the lion’s share of attention from academics and (we assume) the popular press. We highlight that this problem of knowledge bias is troublesome, not only because small units in combination contain a good number of people, but especially because our knowledge of the world tends to be based on highly unrepresentative samples.