The British in India

 The Indian sub continent was home to some of the world's great civilisations and was part of the most powerful empires. We need think only of the Mughals, but long before that Ashoka and the ideas of peaceful kingship in Buddhism. The country was populous and land was well used in agriculture. It is large, and peoples from different parts are quite distinct in language and culture. It is a place of great art; Indian textiles were the envy of the world, but so too many other crafts. The Silk Road ran across the top of the sub continent and so it is hardly surprising that influences from east and west filtered through.

As I explain in this link British merchants saw their counterparts in other countries taking the lead in international trade and they persuaded ElizabethI that England should follow suit.

The East India Company, founded in 1599, competed with companies from other European nations for full control of the overall governance of India with the objective first of trade. In order to do this it recruited 'sound men' educated later at Haileybury. Alongside civilians, the company had a small army of Englishmen educated at Addiscombe. There were exceptions, the Bombay Burmah Trading Company had a tradition of taking graduates from Kings College, Cambridge. Nepotism was the order of the day, and David Gilmour in his highly readable The British in India traces many generations of families who went out to serve. The word Service is important for to many it was a vocation. To others it was an opportunity to amass a fortune, although probably as many lost fortunes. The British upper middle class featured widely, sending second or third sons. Many families made their homes in India although much of the subcontinent failed to offer anything like comfort to young wives. Unlike Africa, there was no push for settlers nor any strong missionary activity. Nevertheless those who did come believed that their culture was superior and should be adopted. In the nineteenth century much changed and the scope for making fortunes all but disappeared.

David Gilmour makes a number of fundamental points. It was all about trade. When the East India Company arrived they established factories (as opposed to manu-factories) in a number of coastal areas which were staffed by 'factors' who would buy and sell with the local princes. The British were not alone, traders from France, Denmark and Holland also set up factories; Bombay was established on land leased from the Portuguese. There was relative harmony, broken perhaps by the old rivalry between the British and the French when the latter took Madras in 1746 and occupied it albeit briefly. No country brought large numbers of people, even in the bigger centres of population Europeans would be counted in the hundreds; no country brought many soldiers; there may have been for example British officers but most of the other ranks would be Indian. This changed, but only to a degree after the Rebellion in 1857.

The Great Rebellion or First War of Independence, or Indian Mutiny as the British Press preferred, was viciously cruel on both sides. The East India Company had its own army paid from its trading profits and reinforcements were sent from the UK. Kanpur was the place of a massacre of hundreds of British men, women and children, and the retaliation which followed saw the British killing everyone who was suspected of being a rebel. The rebellion was eventually quashed, the East India Company abolished and India became part of the Empire with an Indian Civil Service ‘whose high-minded and disinterested ethos was very different from that which had prevailed before’. There was an Indian Army with a high proportion of British troops and a Viceroy answerable to the new post of Secretary of State for India. Thus began a new chapter in Anglo-Indian relations.

In terms of manufacture, Kanpur (Cawnpure) became, with the coming of the railway in 1859, the 'Manchester of the East'. I wrote of this in my book, MacRoberts Reply.

Gilmour suggests that rather more Scots came to India to carry on business than did the English and he wonders whether their more appropriate university curriculum helped. As I have noted elsewhere, the English universities, essentially Oxford and Cambridge, were wedded to the classics whereas business requires engineering and accounting skills amongst many others. Most of British business in India was under the control of managing agencies. The largest was Tata founded by a Parsi family; the next four were Scottish: Andrew Yule, Inchcape, James Finlay and Burn & Co. Those men involved in business were known as boxwallahs. Gilmour explains that the word Wallah means man and the prefix describes what he does. The 'box' would contain samples of what he had to sell, and the term was stretched to encompass a much bigger business world. British India was hounded by class distinctions based both on birth and occupation. Boxwallahs and manufacturers were looked down upon by the ruling elite as they were in England. In many ways this echoed the Hindu cast system.

In terms of businesses, there were minerals to extract and engineers in the Kolar Gold Field in southern India were Cornish, the tinplate company was run by Welshmen. Tata Iron and Steel at Jamshepur employed men from just about every European nation. Tea planting was a substantial business, coffee was also grown but proved a difficult crop. Jute was important and here the skills came from Dundee which town imported the Indian crop. In time British factories were established in India to process the jute. Edward Parry, a Welshman, founded Parry's brewery which was the most famous trading company in the south of India. Edward Dyer from Devon ran an even larger brewery company in Simla, Rawalpindi and Mandalay. Later, Hodgsons produced India pale ale and Parry’s, Naval Gin. The coming of ice factories in 1878 was welcomed with open arms.

Burmah Oil and the Assam Oil companies began production in the 1890s. In Burmah, teak was big business with MacGregors as the major company. George Orwell, whose parents were born in Bengal, wrote of this in Burmese Days. John Maxwell established his plantation of Indigo Blue near Kanpur and this was big business in Bengal until synthetic indigo was produced in Germany, along with aniline dyes. Other raw materials included rubber and cinchona for quinine, lac and shellac for gramophone records, and Opium.

Gilmour's book focuses on many aspects of the lives the British people who went out to India. There was much sport and of course the British brought cricket to the subcontinent. The current primacy of Indian cricket is perhaps an example of the colonised becoming the coloniser Indian cricket. Tata surely is another.

Homes for the British were often substantial bungalows, but furniture tended to be sparse given the ravages of insect infestation. Some would have English furniture copied by local craftsmen. For much domestic equipment there was mail order and the Army and Navy Stores in Calcutta and Bombay. Ceiling fans were introduced after the First World War manufactured by Crompton Parkinson and GEC. By the time of the Second World War they were being manufactured locally.

India had produced fine cotton since ancient times. The demand for cotton fabrics in East Africa grew such that a trade began in slaves from Africa to pick cotton for princes in India. Britain had long been a market for Indian cotton fabrics and I tell elsewhere of the rise of Lancashire using raw cotton from the New World. As the grip of the East India Company weakened with legislation passed in 1813 the import of finished cotton goods was restricted and the import of Indian raw cotton into Britain was encouraged; India was to be the customer for finished British goods and the provider of raw materials, principally cotton. Manchester merchants continued to import raw cotton from America, but the American civil war created a cotton famine and renewed attention turned to the cotton growers of India.

The next logical step was to bring the mechanised cotton mill to India and import firstly yarn and then finished cloth into England. The first such mill was set up in 1818 but it was not until the 1850s that mills set up in Bombay, Broach and Ahmedabad were to become successful. The very early mills were powered by water, but steam provided by British manufacturers took over. Some mills were British owned, but increasingly Parsi merchants took hold of the industry; they had previously been significant growers and exporters of raw cotton. Early on it was yarn that was produced but soon both spinning and weaving were undertaken by such companies as the Bombay Spinning and Weaving Mill and the Oriental Spinning and Weaving Company. The Empress Mill at Nagpur set up by the Tata family in 1877 was the largest to date. Further mills followed in Calcutta. By 1890, India was exporting 170 million pounds of cotton twist and yarn a year.

Goods and people travelling from England to India first went by sailing ship down the coast of Africa round the cape and on to Madagascar before crossing the Indian ocean. The trip was long and hazardous. Ships could be blown off course and reach south America before re-setting course to the west. Sailing ships seldom survived serious storms and if they did there was the danger of pirates and then the enemies of the British state: Portugal, France or Holland. We look to shipyards on the Thames for these 'East Indiamen' as these ships were known. The coming of steam eliminated the wind enemy and speeded the journey; for passengers there came the alternative of passage by ship to the eastern end of the Mediterranean and then overland to another ship on the Red Sea for the onward journey. Later the Suez Canal would further shorten the journey. The problem now was refreshing supplies of coal for the engines. Welsh coal would be shipped to coaling ports. I offer my father's description of the process in Port Said on his way to trade in East Africa in my book Dunkirk to D Day. Of the ships, Maudslay Sons and Field on the Thames built steam powered iron hulled ships for the East India Company as did yards on the Clyde. I tell the story of a Dublin yard supplying a ship to the East India Company. India was getting everywhere.

Coal was to become essential to industry in India and the first coal mine was sunk in Bengal in the late eighteenth century, but produced coal of an inferior quality to that shipped from Britain. In 1808, the Court of Directors of the British India Company seeing the cost of coal imports suggested that Ordnance Works should be shifted to Britain. I explore below the extent of Ordnance work then in India. In relation to coal mining, the government employed a mining engineer, William Jones, to carry out a full survey. He found a rich seem of coal at Raniganj. He failed to make a success, but laid the foundation for Indian coal mining. The coal from the Raniganj mines had to be transported by river 150 miles to Calcutta; however the river Damodar was only navigable for 10 weeks of the years and so coal had to be stored on the river bank to await shipment. The constant sunshine evaporated tar and coal-oil so reducing its burning quality. Coal was later discovered closer to Calcutta and the coming of the railways addressed the problem of transport.

The coming of the railways brings into the story two branches of the army: engineers and sappers for it was military engineers who largely built the railways and also the canal and drainage schemes. They also put on the architect hat, designing a great many buildings borrowing British styles. In 1853, the first railway line was opened running from Bombay to Thana by the Great Peninsula Railway. Others followed and by 1859 the East India Railway had received from Britain 77 locomotives, 228 coaches and 848 freight wagons. In 1895 the first locomotive was wholly built in India at Ajmer Works. Of British manufacturers, the Metropolitan Railway Carriage and Wagon Company Ltd in particular falls to be mentioned.

Fundamental to railways was the production of iron and steel. I have already noted the Jamshedpur steel works which was founded by the Tata family in 1907. Before this the first blast furnace in India was set up at Kulti in 1870. Subsequently the Ordnance Factory Board established the Metal and Steel Factory in Calcutta in 1872. Before any of these, bulk steel was shipped largely from Britain, although India did have long tradition of making fine steel. I noted elsewhere that iron works in Stockton cast rails for the Indian rail system. Examples of such rail stamped 'Stockton 1891' were re-used in the single track railway in what was Persia.

The Army in India was part British and part Indian and its predecessors had long since set up their own supply arrangements. The manufacture of Ordnance, that is arms and other equipment, for the Indian army, goes back to the early days of the East India Company with the making of gunpowder from saltpetre which was in plentiful supply. In the eighteenth century, brass cannon were cast and later cannon cast from iron. Rifles were imported until the early twentieth century, given the precision demanded by modern rifle design. Saddlery was made in Cawnpore as was army clothing: John Stewart's harness and saddle factory was supplying all the leather equipment of the British armies in Asia. For a long time army vehicles were also imported. There were Ordnance factories in all the major centres and their successors have now become a major force in the Indian economy. I write on Ordnance supply in the Second World War in Dunkirk to D Day when my father was sent out to review arrangements for a possible land war against Japan.

As with Africa, a good number of British companies established a significant presence in India. Today, several much loved British brands have found new homes there: BSA and Royal Enfield to name but two.

Further reading

• David Gilmour, The British in India (Allen Lane, 2018)
• Ray, Indrajit, and Krishna Paul. “BEGINNINGS OF COAL INDUSTRY IN BENGAL.” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, vol. 61, 2000, pp. 836–47. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44148157. Accessed 4 Aug. 2025.
• Sahoo, Rajib Lochan. “INDIAN COTTON MILLS AND THE BRITISH ECONOMIC POLICY, 1854-1894".” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, vol. 76, 2015, pp. 356–67. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44156602. Accessed 4 Aug. 2025.
• https://victorianweb.org/technology/railways/india/chronology
• Young, H. A. “THE INDIAN ORDNANCE FACTORIES AND INDIAN INDUSTRIES.” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, vol. 72, no. 3715, 1924, pp. 175–88. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41356452. Accessed 4 Aug. 2025.

The Scramble for Africa

 In any search for significant British manufacturing places, the continent of Africa figures for good or mainly evil. It had the resource that the Industrial Revolution needed but also that for which the developed world hungered. Thus any account of British manufacturing cannot ignore what was long known as the dark continent, not least since that is where our ancestors came from.

I have long had a book on my shelves titled The Scramble for Africa. In it Thomas Pakenham takes his reader through a dreadful story on so many levels. Yet, Europe's relationship with the continent does go back much further than his essentially nineteenth century account.

With the Ottoman empire controlling the Mediterranean, Spain (Christopher Columbus 1492) went west, but Portugal (Vasco da Gama 1498) headed east following the coast of Africa and round the cape up to Madagascar and across the Indian ocean. The Portuguese claimed possession of Angola on the west coast and Mozambique in the East. (I write of my father's experience of trading in Mozambique in the early twentieth century in my book Dunkirk to D Day. He bartered 'Manchester goods' for ground nuts and mealies.)

Soon after da Gama, the Portuguese were trading brass for ivory in vast quantities; the country known as the Cote d'Ivoire was so named with good reason. The Nigerians were taking a little of the brass and rolling it flat to take finely drawn images - one such is one of the one hundred objects Neil MacGregor chose for his History of the World. The evidence is of mutual respect with no hint of racism which would come later with the slave trade.

The first slaves were taken to America in 1619 – there followed a trade in human beings who would be rounded up by African chiefs and sold to European traders to transport to the sugar and cotton plantations of the New World. Some twelve million people were traded in this way in unbelievable horror. In the context of British manufacturing we have to accept that the labour which slavery provided was fundamental to the supply of cotton which was a key raw material of the industrial revolution. I should note in passing that each of Spain, Portugal, the Dutch, the Ottomans and indeed Africans traded slaves alongside the British.

Pakenham starts his story in 1876 with Queen Victoria's nephew, Leopold II of Belgium, who believed that the Belgians would benefit from an empire; after all it was not only the Portuguese: the Spanish had South America, the British had India and America, the Dutch has the East Indies and the French not only America but interests in Indo-China. Leopold had been inspired by the stories of exploration of Livingstone and Stanley. He cast his initiative as philanthropic with Stanley as his explorer.

Pakenham's account is long and detailed, but I think there are threads which can be drawn. Exploration of the dark continent was not to be undertaken lightly; it was dangerous and demanding. The account written by Stanley of the hardships of exploration one might have thought would be enough to discourage all but the brave; yet there were brave men.

Britain, France and Germany were jostling for position in Europe and their ambitions spread to the dark continent. Germany had not been interested in imperial expansion until Bismark had a change of heart, but after that they were well into the scramble. The Dutch in the shape of the Boers were already in the south.

The role of the Ottomans is significant since they gained control of a good portion of north east Africa. Sudan was under the rule of a Muslim emperor.

The other role sometimes forgotten was that of the Africans themselves. Pakenham paints a picture of great diversity of both groups and their leaders - some three thousand tribes. Some lived in temperate and beautiful places enjoying a peaceful existence. There were some large towns with the ruling class living in some luxury. There was art as evidenced by the Nigerian brass plate with finely drawn images. For others it was dessert, swamp or rain forrest. Many were involved in trading ivory, but also slaves. Some, like the Zulus, made disciplined soldiers, others were cannibals. Of these some were obscenely cruel whilst others ate their dead for essential food. Cruelty abounded. Time and again men, women and children would run in terror from fellow African slave traders. Pakenham notes in particular Uganda where the same trait of cruelty was evident well into the twentieth century.

Cruelty was not the sole preserve of the Africans. The actions of members of the European nations were carefully covered up, but, when exposed, rank in evil alongside those of the dominant African tribes but on an even larger scale.

There is a philanthropic strand with missionary activity at its heart. Many in Europe had been sickened by the slave trade and saw it their duty to civilise the 'pagan' Africans. This they did with the spirit of the Reformation: Protestant and Catholic in sometimes violent opposition.

The British succeeded in passing legislation abolishing the slave trade in their territories in the early nineteenth century. The focus of the trade moved east to Sudan which was split between Ottoman and native Africa; the Ottomans had murdered General Gordon in the siege of Khartoum and the Mahadists controlled Sudan. Thirteen years later, of which I write much more below, Egypt under British advisory rule invaded under General Kitchener and slaughtered 12,000 Mahadists at Omdurman. These were but two of many bloody battles.

What I find particularly interesting is the key role taken by British commerce. I wrote in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World how trade had driven exploration. The idea was that a charter company along the lines of the East India Company could gain trade for Britain without cost to the exchequer. Initially it worked to a degree, but, as the competing governments gained more and more imperialist ambitions, there was more at stake and the governments took over. In Britain this coincided with the arrival of Joseph Chamberlain at the Colonial Office.

So we have The Imperial British African Company (previously the British East Africa Company) in East Africa set up by Sir William Mackinnon. Mackinnon was a man inspired by Livingstone and who shared his belief that the task of developing Africa had the three strands of Christianity, Commerce and Civilisation. For Mackinnon, Christianity came first and he wrestled with the discordance of this with the growing capitalism. Commerce mattered too, for Mackinnon also ran one of the largest shipping lines, later to become Inchcape, amongst many commercial enterprises. His company was to develop trade in East Africa. It had an ambition to build a railway from Mombasa to Lake Victoria. The Duke of Sutherland was among the directors and I have photograph of my father on Mombasa railway station in 1908 with the Duke's son the Marquis of Stafford whom my father had met by chance on the ship out from England.

The collapse of Barings bank made financing the railway increasingly difficult so much so that the company ran out of money and, after much blood was shed, the territory fell to the protection of the British government. British East Africa comprised Uganda and what would become Kenya.

In the south, there was gold and diamonds for explorers. Companies to emerge which are still in evidence today included De Beers and Consolidated Goldfields, in both of which Cecil Rhodes had a significant interest. His Charter Company (British South African Company) led the push north into what became Rhodesia and then further into copper rich Northern Rhodesia which became Zambia.

In the west, Sir George Goldie's National African Company (later known as the Royal Niger Company and United Africa Company) led expansion. Goldie was the youngest son of an old Isle of Man family and very much a free spirit. The battle was for the palm oil and ivory trade on the Niger and the French under Pierre Brazza proved stiff competition. The conflict linked to the control of the upper Nile and the influence it could have on Egypt where the British and French uncomfortably shared control.

In a sense King Leopold was another commercial participant even though he avowed philanthropic principles. The Congo was rich in wild rubber and as road transport took off so too did the demand for rubber from the likes of Dunlop. The Congo had become profitable.

Overriding all of this were competing ambitions. The British, led really by Rhodes, imagined an Africa which could be crossed from north to south without leaving territory coloured pink on the map. Then the French looked to do the same, but from East to West. Italians wanted influence in Ethiopia and the Germans in South West and East Africa. The Portuguese were already there in Mozambique and Angola.

The flea in the ointment were the Sudanese Mahdists with their Dervish warriors and here we come to Kitchener, Obduman and revenge for the murder of Gordon. The script remains the same, the French and British advancing to the upper Nile, the French from their lands in the west, the British and Egyptians from the north ; their mutual enemy the Mahadists.

For the British it was technology that triumphed: the Sudan military railway built by Percy Girouard who would be Director General of Munitions Supply in the First World War. The building of the railway as the army advanced was a triumph; workshops were set up at Wadi Halfa on the Nile in Sudan. Less so the locomotives, so Rhodes sent heavy engines from the south and others were imported from America. Then the weapons: the newly invented Maxim machine gun (1884) made in London. In 1888, the Lee-Metford Rifle was developed, combining the rifled-bore developed by William Ellis Metford with the bolt action and detachable magazine of James Paris Lee. This rifle succeeded the Martini Henry all made by the Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield. The Lee-Medford was in turn superseded by the Lee-Enfield, designed in 1895. Rifles were also provided by the Birmingham Small Arms Factory. Howitzers made in Woolwich and gun boats steaming up the Nile added to the extraordinary arsenal. The Dervishes had spears and obsolete slow firing Remingtons.

The result was victory for Kitchener who then put his large force face to face with the very small French force also competing for control of the Upper Nile. Eventually the French politicians relented leaving the British in control of the vast expanse between Lake Victoria and the Mediterranean.

A small statistic intrigued me. Kitchener’s steam ships could make the journey back to Britain in sixteen days; it had taken Kitchener two and a half years to get from Cairo, albeit that he was building a railway as he went!

Now it was the turn of the British to suffer from inefficient lines of supply. The Boers in the Transvaal had Mauser rifles from Germany and French De Bange artillery, but were thought to be no match for the British. How wrong! This was war as it would haunt the twentieth century. Kitchener joined the British, but even he made no quick difference.

Pakenham observes that twenty years of struggle until then had cost comparatively few British lives (but many African), but in South Africa angry Boer farmers armed with the latest German rifles gave the British army a taste of the emerging world. As witness, a young Winston Churchill reported on the war.

The formal war, strongly supported by the British gold mining interests in Johannesburg, ended with the British as victors, but the Boers would not give in. There followed a commando war with attacks on British supply columns and retaliatory raids on Boer farmers. Kitchener saw that the raids weren’t working and began a process of enclosing groups of Boers behind barbed wire fences policed by armed Africans who had no love for their Boer masters. This process developed into camps where mainly women and children were crowded together with restricted rations; disease became rife. The British press reported to an horrified public on these ‘concentration’ camps. It was horrific, but a fraction of whites died compared to many thousands of Africans during the Struggle. Eventually the Boers relented, but victory had a sour taste. Countless Africans continued to suffer. It was not only Africans, the gold mines recruited Chinese coolies who lived and worked as slaves, for Africans now rejected mining because of its low wages. The Chinese problem occupied the British press and the Under Colonial Secretary, Winston Churchill.

The Congo remained in Leopold’s hands and paid for grand projects in Belgium. It soon became apparent that rubber was being collected by slave labour. But worse was the treatment of the slaves and the canabalism of many of the indigenous masters. Disease spread and the population shrank. The French, in their part of the Congo, piggybacked on the abuse and eventually saw a monetary return for years of effort. A report of the situation by Roger Casement sent shockwaves through Britain. Yet, neither France nor Germany wished to rock the boat. The Germans had more pressing issues.

German West Africa witnessed rebellion against the white occupiers. The solution was cruel oppression; if the rebels couldn’t be beaten on the battlefield they would be driven into the Kalahari desert to die from thirst, disease and starvation. Similarly in East Africa, the local tribes rebelled believing they were protected by 'medicine'. They pulled up the cotton crop, which they were being force to grow, and at first succeeded. Reinforcements arrived and the rebels discovered that their medicine was ineffective. Starvation by the destruction of crops proved a better and crueller weapon than the Mausers. Such was the destruction that inhabited and farmed areas reverted to being the home of wild animals.

Rebellion now spread to the French Congo and Pierre Brazza was sent back to report. He died whilst on his mission, but evidence of cruelty hit the Paris newspapers. The British now faced challenges in Nigeria, the government having bought out Goldie. More atrocities were reported.

Churchill visited East Africa in 1907 and wrote columns for the Strand Magazine, boyish articles of adventure. These, I suspect caught my father’s imagination. Churchill found in Kenya white settlers determined to dominate the Africans; yet, in Uganda a Black Country was developing into Livingstone’s vision.

Leopold eventually sold the Congo to the Belgian government, but left the country largely ungoverned. It was rich not only in rubber, but also copper and rare metals. South Africa gained independence but shocked the British by electing a Boer to lead the Transvaal allowing a colour bar throughout the new country.

The Second World War took the former German colonies and portioned them out. After the war the Gold Coast discovered new riches as the world developed an appetite for cocoa. This was the first country to gain independence, as Ghana. There followed the ‘wind of change’ as former colonies gained independence from their former masters. British influence was kept alive by radio. There is an anecdote of a Deltic engine being used in Somalia to power BBC World Service radio transmissions into the African continent. Such was the size of the radio valves used that, when the ‘pips’ were broadcast, the roar of the engine could be heard for miles across the desert.

The powers may have gone, but commercial enterprises remained. In the south De Beers Diamonds and Consolidated Goldfields continue to meet the world’s demands. In sub saharan Africa it was Tiny Rowlands' Lonrho (London and Rhodesian Mining and Land Company Limited). Zambia and Zaire (the former Congo) have rich reserves of copper and rare metals which were exploited by RTZ which had been mining there since 1929, and many others including Konkola Copper Mines.

In my research for both How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines, many British companies had significant operations in Africa.

In the mid 1930s, investigations had been made to assess the possibility of setting up industrial production in Kenya to remove the necessity of importing so many manufactured goods. The place chosen, Nakuru, was conveniently located on the Kenyan communication system both for the collection of raw materials and distribution of finished goods. With the coming of the Second World War and the entry of the Italians in 1940, Nakuru was mobilised to produce what was needed to defend the northern frontier. There was a tannery capable of producing five tons of leather a month, a whole plant for the manufacture of blankets, shoe machinery and a soap plant.

I write in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World how Lever Brothers had acquired the Niger Company in 1920 to secure supplies of palm oil and how in 1929 the Niger company merged with the African and Eastern Trade Corporation Ltd, to form The United Africa Company Ltd. Perhaps in parallel with the initiative in East Africa, from the late thirties through the war and into the late forties, the UAC shifted its focus from providing African countries with what they needed to setting up local manufacturing

These examples barely scratch the surface. Now much of Africa has now fallen to the commercial influence of the Chinese.

Further reading

Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991)

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