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.
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.
The discovery of diamonds in the northeast Cape led to the annexation of the area in 1873, the cause of a diplomatic dispute between Britain and the Orange Free State. Further trouble with the Afrikaners resulted from the annexation of the Transvaal in 1877. Two years later, the Zulus, no longer threatened by the Boers, became a threat to the small British colony at Natal. The 1879 Zulu war resulted in a bloody British defeat at Isandhlwana before the British finally broke Zulu military power. A Boer rebellion in the Transvaal led to another British defeat at Majuba Hill in 1881 and the restoration of conditional sovereignty to the Transvaal. Gold was discovered in the Rand region of the Transvaal in 1886, leading to an influx of primarily British miners.
Disputes about their legal status, combined with ambiguities about the status of the Transvaal and a determination on the part of some British imperialists, including Joseph Chamberlain and Alfred Milner, to force the Boer republics into a union with the British colonies, led to the outbreak of the South African War, or Anglo-Boer War, of 1899-1902. After a series of initial defeats, the British were able to occupy the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, but it took another two years of guerilla warfare to suppress the Boers entirely. South Africa became a self-governing dominion in 1910. One condition of the Boer surrender, however, was the provision that Africans would not be enfranchised before the grant of responsible government, with the result that the Boer majority among the white South African minority was able to impose the apartheid regime of the twentieth century.
British expansion north from South Africa resulted in considerable holdings in southern Africa. Concern about the incursions of other powers, chiefly Germany, and the idea that large and prosperous colonies might be founded in central Africa, led in 1885 to an expedition into what is now Botswana, for the purpose of preserving control of the route north. In 1889, The ambitious diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes obtained a charter for his British South Africa Company, which established a colony in Rhodesia in 1890, and shortly thereafter fought and won two brief wars with the Matabele, a tribe related to the Zulu. Rhodesia included not only the current Zimbabwe but also the mineral-rich territory of northern Rhodesia, now Zambia. In 1915, during World War I, a South African expedition conquered German Southwest Africa, resulting in a British-dominated southern Africa. In the Mediterranean, British trade and the need for protection from pirates dated to the sixteenth century. Britain established an unsuccessful colony at Tangier in the seventeenth 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.
