Obaro Ikime, like A. E. Afigbo, J. A. Atanda, and P. A. Igbafe, started his career as a historian of colonial Nigeria specializing in how colonial policies shaped and reshaped the tempo and dynamics of relations both between the British and Africans on the one hand, and among groups of Africans on the other. While Atanda's and Ikime's work deals more with how colonial policies intensified old differences and introduced new ones between the Oyo and Ibadan and the Urhobo and Itsekiri, respectively, Afigbo's work is essentially about the imposition of the alien political arrangement called the “Warrant Chief System” and its failure. Igbafe's book Benin under British Administration examines how the Benin monarchy responded to Britain's colonial administrative and political arrangements between 1897 and 1938. By focusing on different regions of the country and on specific cases, these eminent historians are able to establish the divergent outcomes of Africans' encounters with alien political structures forcefully imposed on them by the British colonial masters.

Although all these scholars can roughly be classified as historians of indirect rule, Ikime's orientation tilts toward a paradigm that emphasizes the continuity and change in the pattern of African-British relations and African-African relations. He overshot his primary research interest on Urhobo-Itsekiri relations by extending his scholarship to the nature and changing dynamics of intergroup relations in Nigeria at large.