Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We talk a lot on this podcast about the

British Empire in Asia thinking about Singapore, Malay, Burma, through India, Pakistan, Bangladesh,

and into the Indian Ocean. And because I love the 18th century, we talk a lot about the

British Empire in North America and its partial collapse in the 18th century. And also I

think I've had a few people on talking about the late 19th century expansion in South

and East Africa, but apart of the British Empire we don't talk much about, is West Africa,

a vast tract of that continent, tens of millions of people under British rule from the late

19th century to the middle of the 20th century. Apart of the world that had seen earlier

generations arrive at to trade in enslaved Africans, take them over to plantations in the

new world, but attempts to formally annex to colonize parts of West Africa, always founded

on the very tricky geography and the prevalence of disease which Europeans were particularly

vulnerable to. On this episode then, I'm talking to Max Siolan. He's written a really interesting

expose of the British Empire's impact on what is now Africa's most popular state, Nigeria.

Many of the themes in this will be familiar from clean violence, racism, but also the bizarre

way in which the British Empire and other European empires cobbled together these states,

which are now some of the world's most important states, to suit the whims of colonial administrators.

And many of the challenges faced by places as diverse as Nigeria and Syria are partly

down to the intervention, the fiddling with the political geography of generations of imperial

administrators. So this was such an interesting conversation, long overdue, talking about the

British Empire in West Africa and what it continues to mean to this day. If you want to

hear other episodes of this podcast about Britain's Empire, anyone else's empire, you can

do so at historyhit.tv, all the episodes there without any ads. You'll be glad to know.

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