British Empire Colonies in Africa
by Britain’s original holdings in Africa were acquired to support the slave trade. The Royal African Company was founded in 1672 to exploit the West African slave trade on a more systematic basis than had the buccaneers of the previous century.
Gibraltar, seized during the War of the Spanish Succession in the early eighteenth century, was kept as a permanent base afterward. During the French wars of the eighteenth century, Britain at points held the islands of Minorca and Corsica. Malta, seized in 1800, was retained after the Napoleonic Wars, as, for a generation, were the Ionian Islands. Britain acquired Cyprus from Turkey in 1878, for use as a military and naval base directed at Russia and at the protection of the route to India. The Mediterranean had assumed increasing importance as the route to India after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869; although the canal was built with French capital, most of the ships using it were British.
In 1882, British troops occupied Egypt, nominally a vassal of the Ottoman Empire, as the result of a nationalist rebellion against the Khedive and of fears that the rebels would renege on Egypt’s substantial foreign debts and endanger the route to India. At the time, the objective of the government of Prime Minister William Gladstone was only a temporary occupation to restore order; as it was, Britain and British officials, most notably Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer, became increasingly implicated in ruling Egypt. The occupation of Egypt resulted in Britain being sucked into war in the Sudan, where the Egyptian government had claims. General Charles Gordon, sent to evacuate the province, was killed at Khartoum in 1885, creating outrage in Britain, and leading ultimately to the 1898 conquest of the Sudan. A protectorate was declared over Egypt when Britain went to war with Turkey in 1914.
It was a result of war with Turkey that Britain allied itself with Arab nationalists, most famously as a result of the adventures of T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) and acquired the rest of its short-lived empire in the Middle East, including Palestine, Iraq, and Transjordan. Britain had long had interests in the Persian Gulf, largely as a result of trade between that region and India. In the early years of the century, competition with Russia for influence in Persia led to a 1907 agreement on spheres of influence; the subsequent discovery of large oil deposits led to the formation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company to provide fuel for the Royal Navy. British influence in Persia or Iran lasted until the nationalization of British oil interests in 1951.
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