Ashanti Army

The army of the Asante Empire in West Africa was built into a disciplined royal and paramilitary fighting force under the kingdom's founder Osei Tutu, with the king himself serving as supreme commander in the field, though by the nineteenth century the Ministry of War based in the capital Kumasi increasingly directed combat operations. Asante military expansion began in earnest with the defeat of the rival Denkyira state at the Battle of Feyiase in 1701, which secured Asante access to coastal trade routes, and continued through conquests of the western states of Aowin, Nzima, Wassa and Bono between 1712 and 1726, the subjugation of Bono through strategic deception in 1722, victory over Akyem expansion in the 1730s and 1740s that brought Asante ground rents from European coastal settlements, and the conquest of Dagomba in the early 1770s, from which it extracted substantial annual tribute. From 1823 the Asante army fought a series of five wars against the British, killing the British general Charles MacCarthy in the first war of 1823 to 1826 before being repelled near Accra by British rocket technology, fighting a second war to a stalemate in 1863 to 1864, and losing its capital when General Garnet Wolseley's forces captured and burned Kumasi in the third war of 1873 to 1874. The fourth Anglo-Asante War of 1895 to 1896 saw the British annex the empire and exile King Prempeh I, and after Asante forces under Queen Yaa Asantewaa fought a final War of the Golden Stool in 1900, the kingdom formally became a British colony on January 1, 1902.