Abstract
Literature on worldwide colonialism by Europeans is pervasive, unlike scholarship on the colonialism of Africans by Africans that predated the European model. This chapter tests the applicability of colonial theory by focusing on internal and external colonialism in the Old Oyo Empire (ca. 1430–1836). Though pre-modern, this state’s characteristic trajectory and hegemonic legacies in Yorubaland fit well into the colonial paradigm. Colonialism in the African context, as in the Old Oyo case, is similar to Western colonialism in many respects differing in degree, not in kind. This article argues that Old Oyo rule was indeed colonial in nature and consequences, exhibiting internal colonialism within Yorubaland and external colonialism outside Yoruba territory in relatively distant places.
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Adeyeri, J.O. (2019). Colonialism Within and Without: The Old Oyo Empire in West Africa. In: Schorkowitz, D., Chávez, J.R., Schröder, I.W. (eds) Shifting Forms of Continental Colonialism. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9817-9_9
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