Journalist Flora Shaw published the name in The Times on 8 January 1897, suggesting it for the agglomeration of British territories along the lower Niger. She married Frederick Lugard in 1902. On 1 January 1914 Lugard, as Governor-General, formally amalgamated the Northern and Southern Protectorates into the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria — a single administrative entity bringing together more than 250 distinct ethnic groups under a system of indirect rule.
Origins1897 — 1914· Chapter 2
The Name 'Nigeria'
Flora Shaw, future Lady Lugard, coins 'Nigeria' in a Times of London essay, 8 January 1897. By 1914 it is a country.
Source: Margery Perham, Lugard: The Years of Authority (1960)
Era context
The political and economic reality
The government(s), economy and national reality across the period 1897–1914.
British colonial administration
Sir Frederick Lugard → Sir James Robertson
1900–1960
National reality
Amalgamation of the Northern and Southern Protectorates (1914) under indirect rule. Marketing boards extracted cocoa, palm oil and groundnut surpluses; political agitation built through the press and the trade union movement.
Crises of the period
- Aba Women's War (1929)
- Iva Valley shooting of striking miners (1949)
- Kano riots (1953)
GDP (World Bank)
Pre-independence; no national accounts series
Cabinet (selected portfolios)
Full ministerial roster being compiled.
Government administered by Governors-General and Residents. The first indigenous federal ministers were appointed under the 1954 Lyttelton Constitution.
Source: Toyin Falola, A History of Nigeria (CUP, 2008)
Methodology
Tier 1 · primary
Courts. Gazettes. National archives.
Tier 2 · corroborating
OCCRP. HRW. BudgIT. TheCable.
Redline
Wikipedia is never a source.