The Hausa City-States and the Sokoto Caliphate
The Bayajidda legend and the Hausa states, Kano, Katsina, Zazzau and Gobir, walled cities, crafts and trade, Islam among Hausa elites, Usman dan Fodio and the 1804 jihad, the Sokoto Caliphate under Muhammad Bello and Nana Asma'u, its emirates and administration, slavery within the caliphate, and the British conquest of 1903.
City-states to caliphate
The Sokoto Caliphate was among the largest states in 19th-century Africa, a federation of emirates (Kano, Zaria, Katsina, Ilorin, Adamawa and others) owing allegiance to the caliph at Sokoto. It produced a large written literature in Arabic, Hausa and Fulfulde: Usman dan Fodio, his brother Abdullahi and son Muhammad Bello wrote on law, politics and theology, and his daughter Nana Asma'u was a poet and educator who organised women teachers (the yan taru) across the caliphate.
The caliphate's economy depended heavily on slave labour on plantations, a subject historians such as Paul Lovejoy have documented. British forces under Frederick Lugard conquered Kano and Sokoto in 1903, and the emirs became the instruments of indirect rule (Modern Nigeria and Africa P3).
Murray Last, The Sokoto Caliphate (1967); the Kano Chronicle, trans. H.R. Palmer (1908); Jean Boyd and Beverly Mack, The Collected Works of Nana Asma'u (1997); Paul Lovejoy, Jihad in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions (2016).