This chapter will address the various peoples, polities, individuals, movements, and the social-political and economic conditions of Nigeria before the colonial era (1900). It will also go over the processes that spurred ongoing transformations in the complex patchwork of political, cultural, and religious entities that dominated what is known today as Nigeria. This chapter names five principal events as the primary catalysts for these transformations. They are the abolition of the slave trade and the switch to legitimate trade; the Sokoto Jihad; the decline and eventual collapse of the Old Oyo Empire; freed captives returning from Sierra Leone along with the arrival of missionaries; and the advent of colonial rule. These events would result in an environment of instability which gave way to new powers prompted by shifting demands from an increasingly industrialized and interconnected world. The chapter explores the social and economic shifts that resulted from these political changes and how these social and economic processes impacted the political changes in question. Finally, the chapter gives specific examples of lifestyle changes experienced by millions during this period, such as changes in clothing, religious practices, and diet.

October 1887 a veterinarian in Belfast was tinkering with his son’s bicycle. Its metal wheels made the cycle slow, so to fix this, John Dunlop took some rubber that he used in his veterinary practice; he added the inflated tube of sheet rubber to a wooden wheel and rolled both the wooden and metal wheels across his yard in a game to see which could roll furthest. The inflated wooden wheel continued on long after the metal wheel had stopped rolling. The pneumatic tyre was born.

Dunlop’s timing was impeccable. Two years earlier the Rover had first appeared on the market. In contrast to the penny-farthing, the Rover was a rear-wheel-drive, chain-driven ‘safety bicycle’ with two similar-sized wheels. It is the bicycle design still most common today. The two inventions – the new bicycle and the inflatable rubber tyre – transformed the bicycle industry.

Chapter 13 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet explores cities’ role as creators and creations of nineteenth-century imperialism in all of its forms. It shows how imperial rivalries between London, Paris, and Washington DC, the three most “liberal” capitals on Earth, led imperialists to invest in “gun cities,” where arms manufacturers used coal-fueled technologies to produce new guns, cannons, and battleships that ended the “Age of Parity” between the gunpowder empires of Afro-Eurasia. The city of Calcutta served as the pivot-point of the new era of European dominance, serving as headquarters of the British conquest of India, and later as key port to undermine the power of the Qing Dynasty in Beijing by means of shipments of opium into Guangzhou (Canton) that resulted in European “concessions” in key ports of East Asia. The chapter also demonstrates how the settler colonial conquest of the Americas relied upon and resulted in the proliferation of new cities across the continent. Finally it shows how the imperial Scramble for Africa relied on all of these city-enabled techniques. In most cases, European imperial officials deemed some form of segregation by “race” crucial to the effectiveness of their urban weapons of conquest and imperial rule.

This chapter surveys the historical background of the global spread of English and its linguistic consequences. Since World Englishes are mostly products of colonialism, it surveys the history of European colonization and colonization types, the growth and decline of the British Empire, and the role of the United States in the globalization of English. It discusses the tension between the internationalization and the localization of English, the range of variety types which have consequently grown in specific circumstances; and offers numbers of varieties and speakers involved, including a global map of countries in which English has some sort of a special internal status. It is shown that, surprisingly, the global growth of English gained even more momentum after the end of the colonial period. The constant leitmotif in all of this is the relationship between the language-external and the internal, the direct functional relationship between historical events and constellations, the communicative patterns caused by these, and, consequently, their effects upon the development of linguistic forms and varieties.