Premium Times Books publishes ‘The Sokoto Caliphate’ — UI’s first PhD thesis

Premium Times Books has published a book titled “The Sokoto Caliphate”, the first PhD thesis by the University of Ibadan.

Murray Last, the author of the book, was a graduate student at Yale University when he first heard about the ‘Fulani Empire’ in northern Nigeria.

He later moved to Nigeria to attend the University College Ibadan (now University of Ibadan) to learn more about Nigerian history.

“We were determined in Ibadan to show how African history could be just as seriously ‘scholarly’ as anything written about, say, ancient Greece or Rome. Done like that, our new history couldn’t be written off as just more African folklore or an ethnography inventing the past”, he told Premium Times.

In its heydays, the Sokoto Caliphate’s east-west boundary stretched from modern Cameroon to Burkina Faso and, north-south, from Agadez in Niger Republic to Ilorin.

‘The Sokoto Caliphate’ was first published in 1967. It was the first PhD thesis approved by the University of Ibadan and also the first book that documented the ‘Fulani Empire’, making use of books, records, and letters written by African leaders and officials as primary source material.

The book is acknowledged as the classic text on the ‘Fulani Empire’. It has gone through several editions, including the Hausa edition, Daular Sakkwato, published in 2009, but has never had an all-Nigeria edition until now.

In late 2019, Premium Times Books initiated discussions with Last about publishing the Nigerian edition of The Sokoto Caliphate.

“We at Premium Times Books think the book, The Sokoto Caliphate, is, at the very least, a great resource material for ongoing debates,” Musikilu Mojeed, the chief operating officer of the PREMIUM TIMES Group, said.