From Conquest to Control
Adaptive Colonial Strategies and the Fragility of British Rule in West Africa, c. 1874-1945
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22125618 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Patricius Mensah (0009-0001-5918-986X, University of Cape Coast, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 14 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 39-47 |
| Publication date | 2026-06-27 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | History Research (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2376-6700 • E-ISSN: 2376-6719 |
| Publisher | Science Publishing Group (PUBLISHER • PK) |
| DOI | 10.11648/j.history.20261401.15 |
| OpenAlex | W7167210041 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 10 |
This article examines how British colonial power in West Africa moved from military conquest to routinized administration between the late nineteenth century and the end of the Second World War. It argues that conquest did not, by itself, create durable rule. In the Gold Coast, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone, British authority endured through a changing repertoire of administrative practices: indirect rule, legal pluralism, fiscal extraction, coercive policing, intelligence gathering, urban concentration, and selective incorporation of African intermediaries and elites. These practices were not evidence of an omnipotent imperial design. They were responses to administrative thinness, African resistance, fiscal insecurity, and the political diversity of West African societies. By reading colonial reports, parliamentary papers, district correspondence, and administrative records alongside major secondary scholarship, the article shifts attention from the motives of imperial expansion to the daily techniques through which power was converted into governance. It also places British West Africa within a wider comparative history of empire. Sources in this work are used not as a direct equivalence but as a controlled comparison showing that imperial durability often depends less on conquest itself than on the capacity to modify institutions after conquest. The article, therefore, presents British colonial rule as simultaneously forceful and unstable: forceful in its ability to reorganize law, labour, taxation, space, and authority; unstable because it depended on negotiated legitimacy, local collaborators, and continuous institutional adjustment. The analysis has been sharpened by placing these practices within debates on the colonial state, collaboration, invented tradition, and the production of administrative knowledge, while also grounding the argument in concrete episodes such as the Hut Tax War, the Women’s War, Gold Coast chieftaincy disputes, and Northern Nigerian emirate administration
Bureaucracy · Chiefdom · Colonialism · CONQUEST · Indigenous · Indirect rule · Politics · African history and culture studies · African studies and sociopolitical issues · South African History and Culture
| Highly cited | No |
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