RESEARCH INTERESTS

Independent Africa; law; military history; crime

BIOGRAPHY

Samuel Fury Childs Daly is a historian of law, militarism, and crime in twentieth century Africa. He studies the places where armed conflict and legalism overlap. Warfare often breaks the rules people make for one another, and sometimes it creates new ones in their stead. How do norms and standards of behavior change in wartime, and what happens to them when a war ends? What is the relationship between warfare and ordinary crime? How do military dictators use law, and how do judiciaries check their powers – or enable them? He also has a longstanding interest in fraud, deception, and betrayal. What makes people lie about who they are? What makes a soldier to run from battle? In addition to these topics, he has written about migration, dictatorship, sexuality, and the political economy of addictive drugs. He is currently doing research for two projects – a global history of military desertion, and a book about military imposters and role-players. This work looks beyond West Africa, asking how legal and military values clash in courts, tribunals, and battlefields in different parts of the world. 

His most recent book, Soldier’s Paradise: Militarism in Africa After Empire (Duke University Press, 2024) describes one of the twentieth century’s most widespread ideologies – militarism. Across Africa, the late twentieth century was a time of military coups and martial “revolutions.” The men who staged them had utopian visions. In Nigeria and other former British colonies, army officers remade their countries along martial lines. Some soldiers tried to drum colonialism’s bad habits out of people through military-style discipline, or condition civilians to think more like they did. Others believed that making their countries into vast open-air barracks was what would make them truly “free.” They saw judges and lawyers as allies in that mission, but law wasn’t the disciplinary tool they thought it was. Military regimes found that people could turn law back against them, and only some judges shared their world-making aspirations. Soldier’s Paradise shows how law facilitated militarism, and, at times, worked against it. Long submerged by more hopeful ideological currents, militarism is resurfacing in African politics. Soldier’s Paradise describes where it came from.

His first book, A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2020), connected the Nigerian Civil War to the fraud and violent crime that wracked Nigeria in its wake. Using an original body of legal records from the secessionist Republic of Biafra, it traces how technologies, survival practices, and moral codes that emerged during the fighting lasted long after the war was over. The line between martial violence and violent crime can blur on the battlefield, and once that line is gone it is hard to redraw it.

His work has been published in venues including Past & Present, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He holds a PhD in History from Columbia University, an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and an MA from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He previously taught at Duke University.