The Ashanti Imperial Period

The Ashanti Imperial Period, 1701 to the early twentieth century, was the era of the Ashanti Empire's rise as the dominant power of the Gold Coast region of West Africa, founded when Osei Tutu united the Akan states under the sacred Golden Stool and built a wealthy state on the control of gold deposits and the trans-Atlantic and trans-Saharan trade routes. The Ashanti maintained one of the best-organized bureaucracies and armies in West Africa, fighting a long series of wars against the expanding British on the coast, the Anglo-Ashanti Wars, that lasted from the early nineteenth century into the 1900s. British forces finally exiled the Ashanti king and annexed the kingdom as a colony in 1902, though the Golden Stool itself was hidden and never surrendered, and the Ashanti monarchy survives today within the modern Ghanaian state.