British Empire Colonies in Africa

At the conclusion of the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1713), Britain retained Gibraltar and Nova Scotia, and won the right to sell African slaves in Spanish America, an enormous market. Forts, notably Cape Coast Castle, were acquired along the West African coast. After the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and of slavery itself in the British Empire in 1833, these bases were used by the Royal Navy in its long campaign to suppress the slave trade. The colony of Sierra Leone was established in 1787 to settle liberated slaves and North Americans of African origin, in the optimistic but never realized hope that other trades would displace the slave trade and bring peace and prosperity to Africa.

With the decline of the slave trade, Britain’s bases in the region became increasingly less necessary, and it was even proposed in the 1860s to abandon them entirely. Substantial territorial holdings were only acquired in tropical Africa in the 1870s and 1880s, when imperial competition with other powers became acute. Although Mungo Park’s explorations of the Niger River in the 1790s had significantly expanded knowledge of that region’s interior, and trade to the “oil rivers”-the oil being palm oil-expanded throughout the century, it was not until the end of the century that Sir George Goldie’s Royal Niger Company began to assert territorial control in the area; it was only in 1899 that the colony of Nigeria was formally brought under British rule. British expansion in East Africa followed a similar pattern, with explorers such as David Livingston, Richard Burton, and John Speke leading the way, a chartered company professing philanthropic purposes following him, and the formal declarations of East African protectorates occurring only in 1895.

The British acquired Cape Colony in South Africa in 1795, during the wars of the French Revolution. Although the colony was briefly returned to the Dutch at the Peace of Amiens in 1802, the British retained the Cape at the peace of 1815. This colony presented the British with a number of difficulties, including a disaffected Dutch Creole (or Afrikaner or Boer) population and poorly defined frontiers confronting numerous African tribes. The eastern boundaries of the Cape Colony saw in the nineteenth century by one authoritative count nine frontier wars, or “ Kaffi r Wars, ” in the language of the time, in most of which British frontiers advanced in the hope of pacification. Afrikaners discontented with British rule and specifically with the abolition of slavery migrated into the interior, the most significant movement, the Great Trek, beginning in 1837. Rapidly coming into conflict with the Zulu, the Afrikaners founded independent republics, the most prominent of which were the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, which were conditionally recognized by Britain in 1852 and 1854, respectively. British traders had in the meantime arrived at the port that became Durban, and the colony of Natal was annexed by the empire in 1843, creating another set of frontiers with both Africans and Afrikaners.