At the beginning of the 19th century, Britain's main interest was in trade with India, which it had come to dominate by the end of the 18th century. The British interest in Africa was incidental to this--ships bound to and from India had to pass along the African coast where they obtained supplies and occasionally became shipwrecked. Only a few spots in West Africa, like the Gold Coast and the Slave Coast (modern Nigeria), offered enough profit to make them attractive in their own right and in the end, the British occupied only the Gambia, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast and Nigeria. Naturally, the British also acquired extensive holdings elsewhere in Africa, notably in Egypt, Kenya and South Africa, but in West Africa, most of the territory went to the French.

Most British attitudes about Africa were shaped by their experience with the slave trade. The British first became involved in the trade in the 16th century and became major players by the 18th century. Most merchant seaman had seen slaves at some time in their career and by the late 18th century the abolition movement began to introduce Africans and their land to a wider audience. The anti-slavery movement scored its first major victory during the Napoleonic Wars when the British government outlawed the transport of slaves in ships as part of its economic war against France's "Continental System." Afterwards, British ships patrolled against slavers from a naval base at Freetown in Sierra Leone.

In the late eighteenth century, industrialization began to stimulate interest in Africa among wealthy English gentlemen who sought opportunities for commerce. A group that included Joseph Banks, a member of Captain Cook's 1868 expedition to the Pacific, formed the "Association for promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa" (later known simply as the Africa Association) in 1788. Their main activity was the funding of expeditions to Africa and public lectures to present the results. Their earliest projects included expeditions by Simon Lucas and John Ledyard, which never got under way, an expedition by Daniel Houghton which ended with his disappearance east of the Gambia River, and an expedition by Mungo Park, who made it to the Niger River and back in 1795-1797. After 1800, the British government became more directly involved with African exploration. The government sponsored Mungo Park's second expedition in 1805 and sent an expedition to the Ashanti capital at Kumasi in 1817. In 1819, the government also designated Freetown as the seat of the Admiralty Court charged with hearing cases involving slave ships seized along the West African coast. Despite the anti-slavery fervor stirred up by the West Africa Squadron and the publication of T. E. Bowditch's influential book, Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee (London, 1819), British interest in Africa declined from 1815 to the 1840s. The main activity was carried out by merchants at trading posts along the Gold Coast and on James Island at the mouth of the Gambia River. British public interest increased again in the 1840s after an attempt to colonize the Lower Niger Valley for the purpose of producing palm oil in 1841-1842. Although many of the white colonists succumbed to disease, the expedition generated news accounts and stimulated an outpouring of new publications containing traveller's tales. A decade later, William Balfour Baikie achieved a major breakthrough when every member of his expedition returned alive after four months on the Lower Niger River in 1852, thanks to twice-daily doses of quinine taken to prevent malaria.

Tapping an oil palm in Sierra Leone Source: T. J. Alldridge, A Transformed Colony

To sailors heading south along Africa's Atlantic Coast, the Gambia River was a delight. Beginning as a wide, deep estuary, it is navigable for about 120 miles by ocean-going sailing ships, another 80 miles by smaller craft to the Barokunda Falls, and an additional 140 miles to the edge of the Futa Jalon mountains by canoe. Beginning in the 15th century, ships from all parts of Europe dropped anchor in the estuary to refit and find supplies before continuing their voyages. During the era of the slave trade, Europeans and Africans used the Gambia as a route to the interior. In the era of legitimate trade, the Gambia provided safe anchorages for merchant ships seeking peanuts, vegetable gum, animal hides and other local products.

Sierra Leone comprises the land on the south side of the Futa Jalon mountains down to the coast. Although it has no large rivers, there are many smaller ones and the area is largely covered with tropical forest. In 1787, British abolitionists began to resettle freed slaves at an agricultural colony valled "Freetown" located beside a bay near the "Lion Rock." After a difficult start, they received a government charter for the Sierra Leone Company in 1791. In 1808, the government began to administer the colony directly.

In 1882, the year that the British occupied Egypt, a British trading company lobbied for government protection of their monopoly on palm oil exports from the Lower Niger River. The principal figure in the company was George Taubman Goldie, a Royal Engineer who entered the Niger River trade as a result of some company shares that he received from his uncle. In 1879, he organized a number of small trading firms into the United African Company (UAC), and in 1882 they changed their name to the National African Company (NAC).

Gold was produced in the Volta River region as early as the 14th century, and Europeans began to trade along the "Gold Coast" in the 1440s. The Portuguese constructed El Minha "castle" on the Gold Coast in 1471 and other European states constructed similar fortified trading posts elsewhere along the Coast. In the 18th century, there were European trading posts roughly every ten miles along the coast. By the 19th century, European treaties reduced the number of European nations who possessed permanent trading posts to three: Britain, the Netherlands and Denmark. The Ashanti Federation, which controlled gold production in the interior, survived in the era of legitimate trade but faced a challenge from a rival confederation composed of small coastal groups backed by the British. This rival group, the Fanti Confederation, became divided into pro- and anti-British factions after the British bought the last Danish post at Christianborg for £10,000 in 1850. Opponents feared that British control over an increasing number of coastal trading posts (by 1850, their only rivals were the Dutch) would reduce competition for African products, resulting in lower prices paid to Africans. When Fanti leaders tried to reorganize without British help in 1868, the British responded with arrests in 1871 and by annexing their land in 1874.

Images like these excited the British public during the Second Anglo-Ashanti War Source: London Illustrated News (March 21, 1874)

The real African power in the region was held by the Ashanti Federation, with its capital at Kumasi in the center of the gold- producing region. The British fought the Ashanti in 1826, 1873, 1893-1894 and 1895-1896, and quelled a final uprising in 1900. The first Anglo-Ashanti War began in 1823 after the Ashanti defeated a small British force under Sir Charles McCarthy and converted his skull into a drinking cup. Although the British beat an Ashanti army near the coast in 1826, they did not try to move inland at this time.

In 1863, after Fanti leaders near the coast refused to return a fugitive slave to the Ashanti, they invaded the British "protectorate" along the coast. Although the result was a stand-off, the British took casualties and public opinion at home started to view the Gold Coast as a quagmire.