ABSTRACT
The outbreak of the First World War, which the Turkish Caliphate had entered on the side of the Central Powers, threatened the class alliance and prompted new British fears of a pan-Islamic revolt. The Caliphal conquest brought to a close almost a century of social, economic, and political development which had opened in 1796 with the jihadi overthrow of the so-called sarauta system of government. To grasp the specific form in which capitalism developed in northern Nigeria requires, however, a careful reconstruction of the indigenous social formation itself. Regarded abstractly and formally, then, class consciousness implies a class-conditioned unconsciousness of ones' own socio-historical and economic condition. The colonial concern for extending and systematizing pre-colonial taxes meshed nicely with the concerns of the British Cotton Growing Association and its merchant brethren who sought to supply a flagging British economy with strategic raw materials.
