British Somaliland

A protectorate held for its goats. Britain took the northern Somali coast in the 1880s chiefly to secure meat supplies for the garrison at Aden across the gulf, and administered it for seventy years with a minimum of expense, schools or roads - it was run for much of that time from India rather than London. The territory's defining episode was the twenty-year resistance of Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, whose Dervish movement fought the British, the Ethiopians and the Italians from 1899 until 1920, built stone forts at Taleh, and was finally broken by aerial bombardment in one of the first uses of air power for colonial policing. Britain twice abandoned the interior entirely during that war and withdrew to the coast. Italy occupied the protectorate briefly in 1940, and Britain retook it in 1941 and then governed Italian Somaliland as well until 1950, which made the idea of a single Somali state look administratively plausible for the first time. Independence came on 26 June 1960, five days before the Italian trust territory to the south. The State of Somaliland existed as a recognised country for those five days, then merged with it to form Somalia in a union arranged in haste and never ratified by a common law. The north declared the union void in 1991, and the territory has governed itself as unrecognised Somaliland since, within the borders Britain drew. Hargeisa was the capital and remains so. The Dervish forts at Taleh are still standing. Britain's first camel corps was raised here. Somaliland prints its own currency and holds its own elections, and no state recognises it.

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