ABSTRACT
Imperialism was about trade, resources, and wealth, and unfortunately for more than 300 years the continent's greatest resource as far as the outside world was concerned consisted of the people who were seized and shipped across the Atlantic and Indian oceans as slaves. Later, in the prelude to the Scramble for Africa, Europeans began to look at the huge and largely unknown continent on their doorstep as a potential source of wealth in the form of commodities, whether mineral or agricultural. Imperialists such as Sir George Taubman Goldie combined enthusiasm for imperial expansion and control with a shrewd eye for business opportunities. Goldie, for example, succeeded in amalgamating the various British commercial interests on the Niger to form the United Africa Company in 1879; subsequently, after buying out French interests in the region Goldie, with the help of a charter from the British government, turned the United Africa Company into the Royal Niger Company.
