explorer military colonial administrator mercenary
Lugard was born in Madras (now Chennai) in India, but was raised in Worcester, England. He was the son of the Rev'd Frederick Grueber Lugard, a British Army chaplain at Madras, and his third wife Mary Howard (1819–1865), the youngest daughter of Rev'd John Garton Howard (1786–1862), a younger son of landed gentry from Thorne and Melbourne near York. The name 'Dealtry' was in honour of Thomas Dealtry, a friend of his father.
He attended the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, England.
He entered the army in 1878, joining the Norfolk regiment.
He obtained a commission in 1878 and returned to India, where he participated in the Afghan War of 1879-1880.
During this time the company decided to withdraw from Buganda, a decision Lugard chose to ignore.
In England, Lugard was criticized for his activities in Buganda, particularly for his treatment of French missionaries.
Creation of Nigeria In 1894 Lugard visited West Africa for the first time.
During his tenure Lugard laid the foundations of British rule in the North, first establishing British sovereignty by conquest of the Moslem states which had resisted alien domination and then by developing the forms of administration whereby the British would rule.
Then, in 1912, he returned to Nigeria as governor of both the Northern and Southern protectorates, charged with amalgamating the two territories into a single unit.
Lugard's plans for amalgamation provided for the extension into the Southern Protectorate of the policy of indirect rule which he had developed in the North.
Indirect rule was designed to allow for the administration of colonized peoples through the agency of indigenous institutions.
Although indirect rule was not uniformly effective among peoples of very diverse traditional institutions, Lugard pushed hard for its adoption and as a guide published his Political Memoranda, earlier directives he had circulated in establishing the Northern administration.
Upon his return to England, Lugard set to work on his second book, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (1922).
The book was hailed as an authoritative statement of British policy and became a guide to the administration of British dependencies.
In 1928 he was raised to the peerage.
He made significant contributions to the theory and practice of the British colonial policy of indirect rule. He was Governor of Hong Kong (1907–1912), the last Governor of the Southern Nigeria Protectorate (1912–1914), the first High Commissioner (1900–1906) and last Governor (1912–1914) of the Northern Nigeria Protectorate and the first Governor-General of Nigeria (1914–1919).
Lugard married, on 10 June 1902, Flora Shaw, daughter of Major-General George Shaw, and granddaughter of Sir Frederick Shaw, 3rd Baronet. She was a writer for The Times and coined the place-name Nigeria. There were no children from the marriage. She died in January 1929; Lugard survived her by sixteen years and died on 11 April 1945, aged 87.
