The Meat of the Story: Cattle Capitalism, Nutrition Science and Veterinary Public Health in Nigerian History, 1878–1960

This study historicises colonial veterinary and nutrition sciences in British Nigeria vis-à-vis the imperial exploitation of the region’s cattle economy from 1860 to 1960. Bringing together social histories of veterinary medicine, food systems, pastoral economies, human–animal relations, and of colonial Nigeria, the work interrogates the place of the cow—migrant, fattened, diseased, dying, or dead—in the colonial economy and transimperial politics. The account follows the colonial cattle as it bridged human and livestock health by virtue of the colonial meatification of Nigerian foodways. The dissertation finds that colonial nutrition and veterinary sciences were political and capitalist sciences mobilised for the imperial control and exploitation of the pastoral economy and food systems of colonial Nigeria and the Central Sudan. The study centres diverse actors—nonhuman and human—as well as multiple epistemes and expertise—expatriate and indigenous—that were involved in the various colonial public health schemes. The research relies on a rich trove of colonial reports, correspondences, and other occasional publications, newspapers and oral testimonies held at various archives in different countries. These include the three arms of the National Archives of Nigeria, the National Archives of the UK, the Nigerian National Veterinary Research Institute’s Repository, Bristol Archives’ Oral History Archive, as well as Unilever Archives, British Online Archives, and Wellcome Collection. Fundamentally multidisciplinary in approach, the study borrows analytical frameworks and discursive tools from the fields of multispecies studies and human–animal studies in foregrounding nonhuman life forms as historical subjects, objects and agents.