Sir George Taubman Goldie

Sir George Dashwood Taubman Goldie (1846–1925) was a Manx-born former Royal Engineers officer who in 1877 took over his brother-in-law's failing Niger trading post and resolved that the only way to make the Niger pay was to monopolise it and govern it. By 1879 he had merged the four competing British firms — Miller Brothers, James Pinnock, Holland Jacques and West African Company — into the United African Company. In 1882 he reorganised it as the National African Company and from 1884 began the systematic treaty-making campaign with the Niger emirs, the Etsu Nupe, the Atta of Igala and dozens of Middle-Belt chiefs that gave Britain its sphere-of-influence claim at the Berlin West Africa Conference (Nov 1884 – Feb 1885).

On 10 July 1886 the Crown granted his company a Royal Charter as the Royal Niger Company, Chartered and Limited, with sovereign powers of administration, taxation and warfare over the Niger basin — the last such charter ever issued by the British Crown (after the East India Company and Hudson's Bay Company). For thirteen years (1886–1899) the RNC was the de facto government of what would become Northern and Middle-Belt Nigeria: it ran its own constabulary (the Royal Niger Constabulary, ancestor of today's Nigerian Army), its own currency (the manilla system survived alongside RNC shillings), its own courts, and a monopoly on Niger trade that crushed African middlemen at Onitsha, Lokoja, Asaba and Idah.

His January 1897 expedition against the Bida Emirate (Etsu Abubakar) and the Emir of Ilorin — 32 officers, 507 troops, two 12-pounders, two Maxims — defeated armies of 25,000 cavalry at Bida (27 January 1897) and Ilorin (16 February 1897) and is the single most important pre-Lugard military event in the conquest of Nigeria. It established the principle of using small Maxim-armed columns against Sokoto-Caliphate cavalry that Lugard would copy in 1903.

By 1898 the French under Captain Cazemajou were probing into Borgu and Nupe; the RNC could not sustain the cost of military defence and London revoked the charter on 31 December 1899. Goldie was paid £865,000 in compensation; the RNC's lands became the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria on 1 January 1900 under Lugard. Goldie retired to London, refused a peerage, burned his papers, and died in obscurity in 1925. The Nigerian Council in 1914 chose 'Nigeria' from a list of names suggested by Flora Shaw (later Lady Lugard) in The Times of 8 January 1897 — a name coined to describe Goldie's territory.