In the 1870s, British troops invaded the African Kingdom of Ashanti, raised its capital, prowled its palace and plundered its exquisite golden treasures.

In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Barnaby Phillips, author of a new book on the subject,

tells Spencer Mizan about the fate of the Urshante Gold and explores the decades-long campaign

to return the treasures to West Africa.

Hello, Barnaby, thank you very much for joining us today.

You've written a book called The African Kingdom of Gold,

which was out at the beginning of March. Now, the kingdom to which the title of the book refers

is the kingdom of the Asante. This is an extraordinary cultural, political and military force.

It rose to prominence in West Africa in the 17th and 18th century.

So just to start, and to give our listeners a bit of context, I wonder if you can introduce

us to the kingdom of the Asante in a bit more detail, kind of give us an overview of what

power in its rise. Sure. So the Ashanti Kingdom is located,

it's still there today, by the way, in what is today Ghana. And it was centered around a city

called Kumasi. So it's an inland kingdom, about 200 kilometres north of the Atlantic coast. And as you said, Spencer, it rose really at the

end of the 17th century. And it was, if you like, an amalgamation of smaller chieftains,

smaller kingdoms, which coalesced around a central king in Kumasi. and its initial power came very much from the gold trade.

There had been Europeans on what was called the gold coast since the 15th century,

but they very much stayed on the coast and did not venture into the interior.

Ashanti controlled the interior trade and worked through middlemen with the Portuguese,

with the Dutch, with the French, with the Brandenburg Germans, with the Danes,

and of course, eventually and very much with the British.

But it's important to say as well that over time, trade evolved, and certainly by the 18th century,

...