Ashanti Crown Colony

Ashanti was a British crown colony in the forest country of modern Ghana from 1902 to 1957. Britain had fought a series of wars against the Asante kingdom during the nineteenth century, and in January 1896 troops occupied Kumasi and deported the Asantehene and his counsellors. A final uprising in 1900, led by Yaa Asantewaa and other chiefs, was crushed after the British captured Kumasi. By the Ashanti Order in Council of 26 September 1901 the kingdom was annexed to the British dominions, and from 1902 it was administered as a colony by conquest under a Chief Commissioner responsible to the Governor of the Gold Coast. The Asante lost their sovereignty but kept much of their social and political order. In 1935 Britain formally recognised a restored Ashanti Confederacy with limited self-government, and the Asantehene's ceremonial role revived. The colony remained separate from the Gold Coast Colony proper, though governed alongside it, until the Ghana Independence Act of 1957 united Ashanti with the Gold Coast and other territories in the new dominion of Ghana.