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Guide to the six files covering Yoruba military organisation, weapons and fortification, the social and economic consequences of nineteenth-century war, campaign historiography, war ritual and medicine, and named field commanders, with a note on what is cross-referenced rather than repeated.
How Yorùbá armies were organised and commanded, from the mounted nobility of Old Ọ̀yọ́ to the achieved war-chief ladders of the nineteenth-century successor states, and how campaigns were recruited, supplied and fought.
Yorùbá arms and fortification from iron-age edged weapons and Ọ̀yọ́'s cavalry economy through the nineteenth-century transition to imported firearms, and the archaeological evidence for defensive earthworks going back centuries before European contact.
How nineteenth-century Yoruba warfare remade society, through refugee city-founding, the economics of captive and pawn labour, the Ajele resident-administrator system, and new patterns of stratification and gender.
Why the nineteenth-century Yoruba wars read differently depending on whether the source is oral tradition, academic history, or a colonial missionary account, illustrated with the Battle of Òsogbo's tactics and the record's treatment of Òwú's origins.
How Yorùbá warfare was bound up with the worship of Ògún, pre-campaign Ifá divination, herbal and spiritual war medicine, and iron oaths sealing military alliances, and how tradition, academic history and colonial missionary sources read that ritual dimension three different ways.
A comparative look at the nineteenth-century Yoruba war leaders, what set the Ọ̀yọ́-derived Kakanfò autocrats apart from Ìbàdàn's achieved-title men, and the frontline commanders below the top rank who do not have their own dedicated file.
An examination of Yoruba defensive war medicine, exploring the physical preparation of ayeta and related charms, practitioner ontologies, tactical battlefield consequences, and critical historiographical debates.
A scholarly analysis of Yoruba military structures, tracing imperial command in Oyo, meritocratic promotional ladders in nineteenth-century Ibadan, and regional variations across Egba, Ijebu, and Ekiti formations.
An examination of Yoruba women during nineteenth-century warfare as military financiers, logisticians, captives, slaveholders, and political leaders under changing militarized state structures.
The diplomatic settlements, British interventions, demobilisation crises, and socioeconomic transformations that ended the nineteenth-century Yoruba wars and restructured political authority under colonial rule.