Colonial Meltdown: Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression by Moses E....

Colonial MeltdownNorthern Nigeria in the Great Depression\nAuthor(s): Moses E. Ochonu\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Ohio University Press, United States\nImprint: Ohio University Press\nISBN-13: 9780821418895, 978-0821418895\nSynopsis\nHistorians of colonial Africa have largely regarded the decade of the Great Depression as a period of intense exploitation and colonial inactivity. In Colonial Meltdown, Moses E. Ochonu challenges this conventional interpretation by mapping the determined, at times violent, yet instructive responses of Northern Nigeria's chiefs, farmers, laborers, artisans, women, traders, and embryonic elites to the British colonial mismanagement of the Great Depression. Colonial Meltdown explores the unraveling of British colonial power at a moment of global economic crisis.\n Ochonu shows that the economic downturn made colonial exploitation all but impossible and that this dearth of profits and surpluses frustrated the colonial administration which then authorized .