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This article explores the distinctly legal vagueness that underpinned citizenship and subjecthood in the British empire in the early twentieth century, drawing specifically on examples from South Africa and Australia. Situating the administration of laws about citizenship within a global context, this offers a revision of the current scholarship on the global ‘color line’. The white ‘color line’ which developed within the British empire was less a shared legal system and more of a constant negotiation between different actors. Unlike other recent studies of citizenship and subjecthood, this is not an intellectual history. This, instead, is a close scrutiny of bureaucratic decision-making precisely because the system which flourished under British rule was designed to accommodate colonial discrimination by encouraging legal vagueness and executive privilege, allowing considerable space for official and unofficial influence. By focusing on liminal groups (Jews in South Africa and women in Australia), it illuminates how a ‘British’ world was constructed, who was included and who excluded from this process, and how this process unfolded, especially concerning issues of race and gender.

Book review.

This thesis is a case study of Great Britain’s colonisation of a few indigenous, contiguous peoples of the Western Lower Niger from 1884 to 1914. These are the Itsekiri, the Western Ijo, the Urhobo, the Isoko and the Ukwuani of present-day Delta State of Southern Nigeria. These case studies were used to ascertain whether, between treaty diplomacy and conquest, which was the central means employed by Great Britain in the colonisation process. The existing standard historiography of Great Britain’s expansion in Nigeria had often emphasised the theme of violence in Great Britain’s relations with indigenous peoples, leaving out totally or paying scant attention to instances of treaty-making. This dissertation challenged this long-held narrative of force as a general means of empire-building by Great Britain in Nigeria. This gap in the standard historiography engendered an understanding of the legal background of European colonialism, bringing out the influence of legal Positivism, the creation of hierarchies of sovereignties, of civilized and uncivilized societies, and how these concepts were used by Europeans to justify empire-building. The practicalities of Great Britain’s use of treaties for colonisation in other areas before the Scramble were highlighted, to indicate, the deployment of legal tools for territorial acquisition and colonisation. The combination of treaty-making, the role of men on the spot, driving the colonial process, and indigenous conditions were reflected on within the context of this dissertation to argue, in the face of the available evidence that, Great Britain’s colonisation of the case study areas was mainly through treaty diplomacy and not by military conquest as was the case with some other Nigerian groups. This research adds to recent historiography that explored previously under-investigated aspects of the age of empire; that in some cases in the course of expansion, the use of force was not a first step choice for the imperial power.