And Now for Something Entirely Different: Nigeria

 Over at the Atlantic, an interview by Conor Friedersdorf  with a Nigerian writer.  From it I learned  learned about the Nigerian caliphate, and its involvement in slavery.  If you can trust wikipedia, it may have been the second largest slave society (after US) at any time, though I don't believe it.  Brazil likely is similar in size and the Roman empire may well have had more slaves than the US. Other empires likely also had numbers in the millions.  The problem though is we're likely comparing apples and oranges, since the rules about slavery were different in different societies.

Nevertheless, an interesting take.

Import Brains (Continued)

Via Marginal Revolution an article on the amazing success of Nigerian-Americans. 

Some points which occur to me:

• importing immigrants who succeed is good foreign aid--they tend to return to the country of origin and/or send remittances.
• I wonder what happens to the children.  There's research, mostly I think on Hispanic immigrants, which show the children as losing the advantages of immigrants and gain the disadvantages of American children (obesity, crime, etc.)
• such success is complicating the task of American racism in finding support for their stereotypes.
• I write all this despite having had negative feelings towards African/Caribbean immigrants in FSA some 25 years ago--there were a couple with whom I had some interactions.  It was easy to doubt their ability to contribute when they had no background in US agriculture (though looking back on it I suspect I was being unfair.)