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In July 1979, Nigeria's federal military government declared a 100% takeover of select operations belonging to the London-based oil company, British Petroleum (BP). The takeover of BP marked the takeover of Nigeria's most lucrative industry that had been controlled by foreign investors. Within the secondary literature a more elaborate version of this event is offered by scholars, declaring it nationalization with little agreement over why this "Giant of West Africa" nationalization BP. Some mention South Africa, others Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe); some mention oil, while others solely discuss UK diplomacy. Why the discrepancy over the reason for nationalization? This project sets out to explain not only why Nigeria nationalized BP in 1979, but also how the nationalization fits into the broad theoretical discussions on nationalism, economic policy, foreign relations, and nationalization. It challenges the popular narrative of why Nigeria nationalized BP and substantially revises it. The argument is put forward that the nationalization of BP hinged almost entirely on the notion of economic nationalism and that the nationalization fit into an established trend of takeovers aimed at foreign companies. The federal military government simply used southern Africa --discussed as the sole reason for nationalization within the secondary Literature-- as a way to bolster international support. This project also project uses the nationalization as a looking-glass into Nigeria and its oil industry during the 1970s. Also, this project addresses the impact the nationalization had on Nigerian society. With regard to nationalism, Nigeria represents an excellent case for understanding the existence and application of economic nationalism, which functions not only as a subject of study much like ethnic nationalism or civic nationalism, but also as a new perspective on the relationship between the various expressions of nationalism and economic policy.

This dissertation examines the repatriation of Nigerian mental patients during Nigeria’s colonial period. In so doing, it explores how racist and paternalistic definitions of the “African mind” developed in the colonial context implicitly influenced psychiatric and governmental officials’ opinions about whether or not Nigerian mental patients should be repatriated when they became mentally ill abroad. When analyzing files of repatriation cases, a distinct pattern emerges: psychiatric and governmental authorities nearly always justified the repatriation of Nigerian mental patients from what they considered “modern” countries with white majority populations such as the United Kingdom or the United States. Nigerian mental patients in these countries were almost always repatriated. The same types of authorities, however, never argued for the repatriation of Nigerians from what they regarded as “primitive” African colonies. Mental patients within Africa, including Muslim pilgrims on the journey to Mecca, were almost never repatriated to Nigeria. The examination of such a wide range of mentally-ill Nigerian migrants from across the globe allows for a new perspective on the power of colonial psychiatry to emerge. Whereas scholarly works on mental illness in colonial Africa thus far have focused overwhelmingly on the effect that definitions of the “African mind” had on Africans within the colonial setting, specifically the colonial mental asylum, this dissertation analyzes how these same definitions affected the terms under which Nigerian migrants lived beyond the asylum setting and throughout the world. The result was a global construction of mental illness that followed colonial subjects wherever they went. This dissertation therefore integrates the fields of African history and global history by focusing on a subject group that was transnational in nature. In so doing, it illustrates the broad parameters within which the psychiatric knowledge and state power influenced each other at an international level and expands the discourse of African resistance to racialized psychiatry to the global arena in ways that previous works have not discussed. / text

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