The country called Nigeria began as a private commercial venture. In 1879 Sir George Dashwood Taubman Goldie consolidated four competing British trading firms on the lower Niger into the United African Company, renamed the National African Company in 1881. The four firms were: (i) Miller Brothers of Glasgow (Alexander Miller, Brother & Co.); (ii) the West African Company Limited (Manchester, formerly Holland Jacques & Co.); (iii) the Central African Trading Company Limited (London); and (iv) James Pinnock & Co. (Liverpool). At the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, Goldie's company was Britain's sole effective presence on the Niger, and on the strength of that monopoly Queen Victoria granted it a Royal Charter on 10 July 1886 as the Royal Niger Company, Chartered & Limited. The Charter conferred something extraordinary: governmental authority — courts, treaties, a constabulary, the right to levy customs duties — over an undefined African interior, in exchange for a private dividend. For the next fourteen years Goldie's RNC ruled the Niger as a corporation. It signed more than 450 treaties with Hausa-Fulani emirs and Niger Delta chiefs, displaced French and German competitors, and enforced its trading monopoly with the Royal Niger Constabulary out of its headquarters at Asaba.
The Brass War of 1895 — the Akassa Raid — was the breaking point. The Royal Niger Company's monopoly had cut the Brassmen (Nembe) of the eastern Niger Delta out of their ancestral palm-oil and fish trade with the interior. They appealed to the Foreign Office; the Foreign Office referred them back to Goldie's company. King Frederick William Koko Mingi VIII of Nembe, who had been baptised a Christian in 1889, renounced his baptism in 1894 and on 29 January 1895 led a war fleet of over thirty canoes — 1,500 to 2,000 men — in a dawn attack on the Royal Niger Company's headquarters at Akassa. Forty Company employees, mostly Kru and Sierra Leonean clerks, were killed; many were taken prisoner and, by some accounts, ritually sacrificed at Nembe. The Royal Navy's punitive expedition under Rear-Admiral Frederick Bedford burnt Nembe and Brass to the ground in February 1895. The subsequent parliamentary inquiry, led by Sir John Kirk, vindicated the Brassmen's grievances about the Company's trading monopoly and was a decisive blow to Goldie's commercial sovereignty — the moment at which London concluded that government by chartered company on the Niger could not be sustained.
It was in the aftermath of these events that the name appeared. Flora Louise Shaw, Colonial Editor of The Times, published an unsigned leading article on 8 January 1897 — headed 'Nigeria' — proposing the term for the territories then administered by the Royal Niger Company. In her own words: "The name Nigeria, applying to no other portion of Africa, may, without offence to any neighbours, be accepted as co-extensive with the territories over which the Royal Niger Company has extended British influence, and may serve to differentiate them equally from the colonies of Lagos and the Niger Protectorate on the coast and from the French territories of the Upper Niger." She rejected 'Royal Niger Company Territories' as too commercial and 'Central Sudan' as imprecise, and the coinage held.
Later that same year Shaw was herself put in the dock. The 'Flora' telegrams — coded cables she had exchanged with Cecil Rhodes in late 1895 in connection with the Jameson Raid into the South African Republic — were subpoenaed by the British Parliamentary Select Committee of Inquiry into the Raid. She appeared before the Committee on 6 and 8 July 1897 in Westminster, was cross-examined for two days about her role as an intermediary between Rhodes, the Colonial Office, and The Times, and conceded under questioning that she had urged Rhodes by cable to 'hurry up' the rising. The Committee — chaired by William Lyttelton Jackson and including Joseph Chamberlain himself — ultimately censured Rhodes but absolved the Colonial Office, and Shaw's testimony, though damaging to her reputation in some quarters, did not end her career. She kept her post at The Times, continued to advocate for the consolidation of the Niger territories, and in 1902 married Sir Frederick Lugard. Goldie's Royal Charter had been revoked on 1 January 1900; the Company was paid £865,000 in compensation; its territories were transferred to the Crown as the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria; and Lugard was installed as its first High Commissioner. The Protectorate of Southern Nigeria was constituted on 1 January 1900 from the former Niger Coast Protectorate and merged with the Colony of Lagos in 1906.
On 1 January 1914, by Letters Patent and Order in Council, Lugard — by then Governor-General-designate — formally amalgamated the Northern and Southern Protectorates into the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria. The Amalgamation was administered, not consultative: it was driven by the Northern Protectorate's chronic budget deficit (financed by Southern customs receipts), by the need for a single railway authority, and by Lugard's preference for the cheap-government doctrine of indirect rule through Native Authorities. No African was consulted. More than 250 ethnic groups — Hausa-Fulani, Yoruba, Igbo, Kanuri, Ijaw, Tiv, Edo, Ibibio, Nupe and others — with separate legal traditions, currencies, succession rules and external trade relations were bracketed under one Governor-General reporting to the Colonial Office in London. Flora Shaw's name from The Times of January 1897, applied to a territory carved out by Goldie's chartered company, sealed by the Royal Navy at Akassa, and stitched together by her husband on New Year's Day 1914, became the name of a country.