Britain and the looted African gold

In the 1870s, British troops invaded the African kingdom of Urshante, razed its capital, prowled its palace, and plundered its exquisite golden treasures. In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Barnaby Phillips, author of a new book on the subject, tells Spencer Mizen about the fate of the Ursante Gold. and explores the decades-long campaign to return the treasures to West Africa. Hello, Barnaby. Thank you very much for joining us today.

You've written a book called The African Kingdom of Gold, which was out at the beginning of March. Now the kingdom to which the title of the book refers is the Kingdom of the Asante. This was an extraordinary cultural, political and military force, it rose to prominence in West Africa in the 17th and 18th century. So just to start and to give our listeners a bit of context, I wonder if you can introduce us to the Kingdom of the Asante in a bit more detail and kind of give us an overview of what powered its rise.

Sure. So the Ashanti Kingdom is located It's still there today, by the way, in what is today Ghana, and it was centred around a city called Kumasi. So it's an inland kingdom about 200 kilometres north of the Atlantic coast. And as you said, Spencer, it it rose really at the end of the 17th century, and it was, if you like, an amalgamation of smaller chieftaincies, smaller kingdoms, which coalesced around a central

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