On 1 January 1914 the Colony of Lagos, the Protectorate of Southern Nigeria and the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria were merged into the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria, with Frederick Lugard as Governor-General.
The amalgamation was driven by fiscal logic — the Northern Protectorate ran a permanent deficit that the Southern customs receipts could subsidise — rather than by any plan of nation-building. The name 'Nigeria' had been coined by Flora Shaw of The Times in a January 1897 article; her husband, by then Lugard, made it official seventeen years later.
The territory was administered as three distinct units: the Colony (Lagos), the Northern Provinces and the Southern Provinces. Each retained a separate legal system, currency arrangement and civil service — a structure that survived until 1939 when the Southern Provinces were split into East and West. See also Before the Name.