<b>The Empire's Potato: What a Colonial Seed Scheme in Nigeria Adds to the Fight Over Who Owns the Seed</b>

Jack Kloppenburg's account in First the Seed is mostly about peacetime institutions: botanic gardens, seed companies, patent law. Colonial records in the Nigerian National Archives in Kaduna show something the peacetime story misses — that dependency was built fastest and hardest not during ordinary colonial administration but during the single wartime shock that reshaped the middle of his period. Why does wartime shock matter more than Kloppenburg's peacetime frame? In this paper, I give a specific, previously untold case, and in doing so surface a mechanism the existing literature has not isolated clearly: the use of military emergency — not ordinary commercial demand — as the engine that most efficiently locks a colony into agricultural dependency. This paper changes how we should read the aid-driven food-security interventions of the present.