Anglo-Ashanti Wars

The Anglo-Ashanti Wars were a series of five conflicts fought between 1823 and 1900 between the British Empire, together with its African coastal allies, and the Ashanti Empire of the Gold Coast interior in what is now Ghana. The wars grew out of Ashanti claims to overlordship over coastal peoples such as the Fante, and Ashanti demands for tribute from British-held coastal forts, tensions that first erupted into open war in 1823 when Ashanti forces defeated and killed the British governor Charles MacCarthy at the Battle of Nsamankow. Despite this and other early Ashanti victories, successive British campaigns steadily eroded Ashanti power, and the fifth and final war, provoked in 1900 by a British demand for the Ashanti's sacred Golden Stool, ended in the complete British annexation of the Ashanti Empire as a colonial protectorate. The series of wars stands as one of the longest sustained African resistances to European colonial conquest in the nineteenth century.