George Goldie's National African Company — chartered as the Royal Niger Company on 10 July 1886 — was Britain's instrument for converting commercial treaties into territorial sovereignty without parliamentary debate. By the time the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 forced Britain to define its 'sphere of influence' on the Niger, Goldie's agents had already signed protection treaties with the Igala (1885), with Etsu Maliki of Nupe (1885), with the Oba of Benin (1892, contested), and across the Lower Niger and the Cross River.
The Company could only sign these treaties because the polities it approached had been weakened by the Yoruba civil wars, the Sokoto–Borno wars, the Aro slaving wars — and by a fourth, less-narrated force: the engineered crash of the cowrie currency between 1845 and 1880, which bankrupted the merchant princes of the coast (Jaja of Opobo, Nana Olomu of Itsekiri, Oba Ovonramwen of Benin, the Aro factor-houses) precisely as Goldie's treaty parties arrived. See How the currency fell before the flag. Each emirate, war-camp or Delta house signed for what looked like local advantage — guns, protection against a near neighbour, a trade monopoly — and discovered that the cumulative effect of all these bilateral treaties was the legal scaffolding of a single British colony.
The charter was revoked on 1 January 1900. The Crown paid Goldie's Company £865,000 plus a guaranteed share of mineral royalties for 99 years — a clause that would matter when commercial oil was discovered at Oloibiri in 1956. The territories became the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria (Lugard) and the Protectorate of Southern Nigeria, amalgamated in 1914 as the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria. The colonial map had been drawn before the colonial state existed.