|
Nigeria THE COLONIAL ECONOMIC LEGACY
Early British Imperialism
The European struggle to establish forts and trading
posts on
the West African coast from about the mid-1600s to the
mid-1700s
was part of the wider competition for trade and empire in
the
Atlantic. The British, like other newcomers to the slave
trade,
found they could compete with the Dutch in West Africa
only by
forming national trading companies. The first such
effective
English enterprise was the Company of the Royal
Adventurers,
chartered in 1660 and succeeded in 1672 by the Royal
African
Company. Only a monopoly company could afford to build and
maintain the forts considered essential to hold stocks of
slaves
and trade goods. In the early eighteenth century, Britain
and
France destroyed the Dutch hold on West African trade; and
by the
end of the French Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic
Wars
(1799-1815), Britain had become the dominant commercial
power in
West Africa
(see European Slave Trade in West Africa
, ch.
1).
The slave trade was one of the major causes of the
devastating internecine strife in southern Nigeria during
the
three centuries to the mid-1800s, when actually abolition
occurred. In the nineteenth century, Britain was
interested
primarily in opening markets for its manufactured goods in
West
Africa and expanding commerce in palm oil. Securing the
oil and
ivory trade required that Britain usurp the power of
coastal
chiefs in what became Nigeria.
Formal "protection" and--eventually--colonization of
Nigeria
resulted not only from the desire to safeguard Britain's
expanding trade interests in the Nigerian hinterland, but
also
from an interest in forestalling formal claims by other
colonial
powers, such as France and Germany. By 1850 British
trading
interests were concentrating in Lagos and the Niger River
delta.
British administration in Nigeria formally began in 1861,
when
Lagos became a crown colony, a step taken in response to
factors
such as the now-illegal activities of slave traders, the
disruption of trade by the Yoruba civil wars, and fears
that the
French would take over Lagos
(see The Nineteenth Century: Revolution and Radical Adjustment
, ch. 1). Through a
series of
steps designed to facilitate trade, by 1906 present-day
Nigeria
was under British control.
Data as of June 1991
|
