Royal Niger Company → United Africa Company (UAC)

The Royal Niger Company is the only commercial enterprise in Nigerian history to have lawfully exercised sovereign governmental power. Between the grant of its Royal Charter on 10 July 1886 and the revocation of that charter on 1 January 1900, the company maintained its own currency (the Niger Company shilling), its own postal service, its own courts (presided over by the Chief Justice of the Niger Territories), its own constabulary of about 1,000 men under European officers, and a navy of armoured river gunboats — the SS Liberty, the SS Sultan of Sokoto and the SS Empire — patrolling the Niger and the Benue.

The company's commercial monopoly was absolute. By a system of trade licences administered from Asaba and Lokoji, no other European or African firm could buy palm oil, palm kernels, ivory, rubber or shea butter inside the Niger Territories without paying the company a duty. The Liverpool houses that had pioneered the trade — Miller Brothers, Hatton & Cookson, James Pinnock, Alexander Miller Brother & Co. — were progressively forced out or absorbed. By 1895 the RNC was handling, by tonnage, the majority of West Africa's vegetable-oil exports.

The revocation of the charter on 1 January 1900 was a Crown act, not a company surrender. The Foreign Office had concluded — after the 1898 Anglo-French Convention on West African boundaries — that company sovereignty could no longer be reconciled with formal British imperial administration. The Crown paid the RNC £865,000 in cash and granted, in addition, a 99-year royalty of half of one per cent on the value of all minerals extracted from the former RNC territories. The mineral clause ran from 1 January 1900 to 31 December 1999 — covering the entire petroleum era. The Federal Government of Nigeria paid out under this clause until the very late colonial period.

The successor entity — the Niger Company Ltd (1900), then UAC (1929), then UAC of Nigeria Plc (1973) — is still listed on the Nigerian Exchange. Its archives, deposited at Unilever House in London and at the Public Record Office at Kew, are the single most important commercial archive for nineteenth-century Nigeria. The continuity of the company's books from 1879 to the present makes it the longest continuously trading commercial enterprise in Nigerian history, and the only one whose corporate memory extends back beyond the existence of the state.