Cowrie shells (Cypraea moneta) served as the principal currency across the Sokoto Caliphate and the Yoruba towns into the late 19th century. The manilla — a horseshoe-shaped brass currency — circulated in the Niger Delta and Igboland and was not officially demonetised until Operation Manilla in 1948.
Pre-19121900· Indigenous· Chapter I · Money
Cowries, manillas, brass rods
Trade currencies of the pre-colonial period; the manilla used in the Niger Delta well into the 1940s.
Sources
- · Marion Johnson, The Cowrie Currencies of West Africa (1970)
What it cost — political & economic reality
The political and economic reality
Nigeria in 1900: who was in charge, the cabinet of the day, the GDP, and the crises that defined the period.
British colonial administration
Sir Frederick Lugard → Sir James Robertson
1900–1960
National reality
Amalgamation of the Northern and Southern Protectorates (1914) under indirect rule. Marketing boards extracted cocoa, palm oil and groundnut surpluses; political agitation built through the press and the trade union movement.
Crises of the period
- Aba Women's War (1929)
- Iva Valley shooting of striking miners (1949)
- Kano riots (1953)
GDP (World Bank)
Pre-independence; no national accounts series
Cabinet (selected portfolios)
Full ministerial roster being compiled.
Government administered by Governors-General and Residents. The first indigenous federal ministers were appointed under the 1954 Lyttelton Constitution.
Source: Toyin Falola, A History of Nigeria (CUP, 2008)
Methodology
Tier 1 · primary
Courts. Gazettes. National archives.
Tier 2 · corroborating
OCCRP. HRW. BudgIT. TheCable.
Redline
Wikipedia is never a source.