4 ideas
In southeastern Nigeria, where Igbo communities had no centralised kings, Britain appointed 'warrant chiefs' to make indirect rule work, and these men often became extortionate and resented. Colonial troops opened fire and killed more than fifty women, showing how importing chieftaincy into societies that lacked it produced authority without legitimacy.
The 1914 merger of Northern and Southern Nigeria was driven mainly by Britain's demand that colonies pay for themselves: the landlocked North ran deficits, and the South's customs revenue could cover them. Lugard unified the budget and the top of the administration but continued to govern the two regions under separate systems.
In the North, Britain ruled through the existing emirs and kept Christian missions out to avoid unsettling Muslim rulers. Because missions ran most Western schooling, the South moved far ahead in literacy, civil-service jobs and nationalist politics. A choice made for cheap administration hardened into an education and power gap that turned regional competition after 1960 into a fight over survival.
Under George Goldie, the Royal Niger Company held a royal charter from 1886 that let it govern, tax and fight along the Niger while running a trade monopoly that shut out African middlemen. The British government revoked the charter and took over the territory in 1900, paying the company compensation, so private profit-seeking laid the ground for formal empire.