The History of Nigeria under British Rule

The country we now call Nigeria was a British invention. The name itself, coined by Flora Shaw of The Times in 1897, was an article of administrative convenience applied to a territory of more than 250 ethnic groups. The amalgamation of 1914, which bolted the Sokoto Caliphate to the Yoruba states of the south under a single colonial administration, was a decision driven by budget arithmetic: the south paid, the north cost, and Lord Lugard wanted to keep both. That this accident of imperial accounting should have produced a state of 250 million people is one of the more astonishing outcomes of British rule in Africa.

The Suppression of the Slave Trade

The British presence in what is now Nigeria began with the suppression of the transatlantic slave trade. The British Navy established the West Africa Squadron in 1808 to patrol the West African coast and intercept slave ships. The squadron was based at Freetown, Sierra Leone, and it seized more than 1,600 slave ships over the course of the nineteenth century. The economic decline of the slave trade weakened the coastal states that had been involved in the trade, and it opened the way for a new commercial relationship between Britain and the Niger Delta, focused on palm oil.

The British consul Benjamin Campbell and the 1851 bombardment of Lagos — by the British naval officer Henry Lockyer, with the loss of perhaps 200 Lagosians — were the most consequential events of this transition. They were also the opening of a new kind of British presence, in which naval force would be the lever of commercial diplomacy.

The Annexation of Lagos

The British annexation of Lagos on 6 August 1861 marked the beginning of formal British rule in Nigeria. The annexation was motivated by British concerns about the slave trade, the protection of British merchants, and the strategic position of Lagos. The Lagos Treaty of Cession, signed by the Oba Docemo, ceded the port to the British Crown. The territory was administered as part of the West Africa Settlements until 1886, when the Colony of Lagos was created. The colony was governed by British administrators working through the traditional Yoruba chiefs, and the territory gradually expanded into the Yoruba hinterland through a series of treaties and protectorate agreements.

The Oil Rivers and Niger Coast Protectorates

The British presence expanded in the 1880s and 1890s with the establishment of the Oil Rivers Protectorate in 1891, which was renamed the Niger Coast Protectorate in 1893. The protectorate was established to protect British commercial interests in the Niger Delta and to suppress the slave trade. The most important British commercial enterprise was the Royal Niger Company, chartered in 1886 under Sir George Goldie, which administered the territories of the lower and middle Niger. The company governed a vast area of the Nigerian interior until 1900, when the British government took over the administration of Northern and Southern Nigeria.

The story of the Royal Niger Company is, in some ways, a parable of late-Victorian imperialism. The company had been established to break a German challenge to British trade in the Niger; it ended as a chartered administrative burden. By 1900, the British government was ready to take over the costs of governance that the company had no longer wished to bear.

The Northern and Southern Nigeria Protectorates

The Royal Niger Company, chartered in 1886, administered the territory that would become the Northern Nigeria Protectorate. In 1900, the British government took over the administration of Northern Nigeria under High Commissioner Frederick Lugard. The northern territory was home to the Sokoto Caliphate, a large and sophisticated Islamic state that had been founded in 1804 by the jihad of Usman dan Fodio. The British conquest of the caliphate, completed in 1903, was one of the most significant military campaigns of the British Empire in West Africa. As the historian Murray Last has shown, the caliphate’s defeat was less a military victory than a negotiated submission; Lugard had neither the troops nor the inclination for a long campaign.

In 1900 the Southern Nigeria Protectorate was established, merging the Niger Coast Protectorate with the territory of the Royal Niger Company. The political systems of the north and south could hardly have been more different. The caliphate had a literate Muslim bureaucracy, a system of taxation, and a tradition of centralised government; the south was a patchwork of Yoruba kingdoms, Igbo stateless societies, and the trading states of the delta.

The Amalgamation of 1914

The amalgamation of the Northern and Southern Nigeria Protectorates in 1914, under the governorship of Lord Lugard, created the basis for the modern Nigerian state. Lugard had argued, in The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (1922), that amalgamation was necessary to combine the revenues of the south with the administrative opportunities of the north. The southern taxpayer effectively subsidised the northern administration, and the system of indirect rule — in which local rulers and traditional institutions were incorporated into the colonial administration — was particularly developed in the north, where the emirs of the Sokoto Caliphate were allowed to retain considerable authority.

Indirect rule, as Toyin Falola has argued, was less a system of government than a series of compromises. The British had neither the staff nor the will to govern Nigeria directly, and indirect rule was the form these absences took. The regional tensions of the colonial period are still visible in modern Nigerian politics, not least in the long-running arguments over revenue allocation and the persistence of sharia criminal law in twelve northern states.

The Path to Independence

The twentieth century saw the development of Nigerian nationalism. The National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC), founded in 1944 with Nnamdi Azikiwe as president, was one of the earliest nationalist organisations. Azikiwe and other leaders demanded self-government, and the 1954 Lyttleton Constitution established a federal system of government. The 1959 general elections produced a coalition government led by Alhaji Tafawa Balewa, and Nigeria became independent on 1 October 1960 with the Queen as head of state and Balewa as prime minister. The country became a federal republic in 1963, with Nnamdi Azikiwe as the first president.

The 1966 military coups and the subsequent civil war (1967–1970) are important parts of the post-independence story. The war, in which perhaps a million people died, was the consequence of the regional tensions that the colonial amalgamation of 1914 had built into the Nigerian state. As the historian Frederick Cooper has put it, the British “created a country that had no precedent in the history of the region, and they did so for reasons that had nothing to do with the people they were governing.”

Historiographical Note

The historiography of colonial Nigeria has been dominated, in the older tradition, by the work of Kenneth Dike, J. F. J. Ajayi, and the Ibadan school of Nigerian historians, who sought to recover African agency in the colonial period. The revisionist literature of the last thirty years — exemplified by Toyin Falola’s many studies, by Ann Genova’s work on the colonial economy, and by Frederick Cooper’s Citizenship Between Empire and Nation (2014) — has complicated that picture. The debates now concern less what the British did than how much Nigerian nationalism was a response to colonial rule and how much it was a force of its own.

In this Section

Other Sections