Ghosts Of Empire: Britain's Legacies In The Modern World

Kwasi Kwarteng, a former student at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he earned a Ph. D in British history has done extensive research in order to pen his book “Ghosts of Empire: Britain’s Legacies in the Modern World.” Fascinated with British colonial history, Kwarteng his written numerous articles on the subject. In one 2012 article, he discusses Nigeria’s modern day troubles faced due to its British colonial roots. Kwarteng (2012) writes that like its name, Nigeria was entirely artificially constructed. In early 1892 Flora Shaw, “The Times” colonial editor did extensive traveling in Parts of Africa. During her time in what was formerly known as the Royal Niger Company Territories she coined the name “Nigeria” to refer to the British protectorate along the Niger River (Kwarteng, 2012). Around the same time, Lord Salsbury, the Prime Minister of Britain at the time observed that, “we …show more content…
There was a suspicion that the British were more instinctively inclined towards the north. Fredrick Lugard was believed to have harbored contempt for the educated and Europeanized Africans of the south, and had once recommended moving the capital from Lagos to the northern city of Kaduna. Even if this bias was not based in fact, it was widely believed to be true by Nigerians. The Nigerian Civil War of 1967 was a direct result of these tensions. As early as 1912, the British socialist E.D. Morel observed that the “Southern Nigerian system is turning out every year hundreds of Europeanized Africans,” but the “Northern Nigerian system aims at the establishment of an educational system based upon a totally different ideal.” Nigeria has remained a seething pool of diverse — and often conflicting — peoples due in part to its arbitrary construct by its colonizers (Kwarteng,