This dissertation comprises a multisite history centered on the Malian trading community that developed in Lagos, Nigeria over the half-century following both countries' independence in 1960. The multiethnic diaspora focused primarily on the trade in imported manufactured goods from the host city's port to landlocked Mali. The study unsettles the dominant globalization narrative equating deterritorialized populations with waning national identity. This pattern did not hold for the Malians in Lagos during the period in which globalization purportedly accelerated. The diasporic experience enhanced a sense of belonging to the homeland, without creating a destabilizing force within the host society. The strengthening of collective national identity came at the expense of identification with particular religious sects, regions, and ethnicities. A number of factors shaped this outcome. Internally, the diaspora remained focused on the Malian nation-state through a transnational public sphere that mediated between it and its overseas citizens. The Malian government itself maintained direct contact with the diaspora through the community's network of civil society organizations. Externally, the Nigerian population of Lagos practiced an exclusionary form of popular nationalism that discouraged assimilation. From the 1960s to 2010, diasporans' identification with the homeland changed, but persisted, despite the pull of competing loyalties. Ethnic and other divisions held the potential for fragmenting the community into autonomous enclaves. Alternatively, the entire group could be assimilated into the host society. Cosmopolitan influences and transnational religious movements threatened to transcend the citizenship differences that defined the diaspora, and displace them as the most instrumental of members' multiple identities. The umma, the transnational community of Muslims, constituted the most powerful of these external forces, given the large number of host society coreligionists. Rather than the umma transcending citizenship, however, the Malian state incorporated Islam into its nationalizing project. Malians in the diaspora remained members of the homeland religious community, reconstructing its localized beliefs, rather than assimilating into the Nigerian jama'at, or adopting the strict scriptural interpretation of global reformist movements. The result was a strengthened connection with the homeland.