A History of Nigeria (Falola and Heaton)

Toyin Falola and Matthew M. Heaton's survey history of Nigeria, published by Cambridge University Press in 2008. Falola, a historian of Nigeria, and Heaton treat the 1967 to 1970 civil war as fundamentally a crisis of Nigerian federalism and ethnic political competition following the 1966 coups and counter-coup, driven by regional rivalry over political power and, once eastern oil revenue became central to the dispute, resource control, with the largely Christian identity of the secessionist Eastern Region read as a demographic fact about the population rather than the war's cause. Its strength is a standard, widely used academic survey placing the war within Nigeria's longer political history. Its limit is that, as a general national history, its account of the war's religious dimension is comparatively brief.