Unfortunately, this article is not in good condition, owing to problems that occurred during the production process. Therefore, instead of attempting to summarise or reproduce it, I here recommend the reader to other items in this Archive, which between them discuss all the topics contained in the article.

     The first two items are included in section 2.4a(i), Ann O’Hear, “The Economic History of Ilorin in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: The Rise and Decline of a Middleman Society,” Ph.D. thesis, Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham, 1983 (available in this Archive and in two other locations in digitised form).

The first item is chapter 5 of my thesis, “The Metropolitan Districts,” which discusses the dependent rural districts around the city of Ilorin both in the nineteenth century and in the colonial period.

     The second is an unpublished conference paper accompanying the thesis: Ann O’Hear, “Colonial Government Agricultural Policies, Ilorin,” which is a detailed account of colonial activities in regard to agricultural development with special reference to the “Metropolitan Districts.” This is very largely a history of failure, and various reasons for this are surveyed in the concluding section of the paper.

The conference paper tells the story of agriculture in the dependent districts largely from above, through the lens of the colonial government, while the third item, section 4.2f (i) and (ii), detailing interviews and observations in Ago Oja village in 1985, is aimed at giving a view from below, providing an impression of the extent to which the people of one village in the Metropolitan Districts had or had not gained from government policies with regard to agriculture-related development, both in the late colonial period and in the first 25 years after independence.

     A fourth source of information on agriculture in the dependent Metropolitan Districts is Ann O’Hear, Power Relations in Nigeria: Ilorin Slaves and Their Successors (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1997), which incorporates much of the material mentioned above, provides a broader economic and political context, and, in chapter 8, offers a sketch of the extent of “development” (broadly defined) in the districts in the 1970s and 1980s. This book, in digitised form, constitutes section 2.1a(i) of this Archive.