The Establishment and Impact of Colonial Infrastructure on Economic Development in Nigeria, 1900 to 1960

This study examines the establishment of colonial infrastructure including railways, roads, ports, and telegraph systems in Nigeria from 1900 to 1960, assessing how these investments shaped the geography and character of economic development during the colonial period. British colonial infrastructure investment in Nigeria was guided primarily by the logic of commodity extraction, designed to move agricultural and mineral exports to coastal ports for shipment to metropolitan markets rather than to facilitate intra-regional economic exchange. Using a descriptive historical design, the study reviews railway construction records, colonial public works reports, and trade statistics from the National Archives Enugu and Ibadan branches, supplemented by secondary literature published between 2020 and 2024. The Dependency Theory and the Infrastructure and Development Framework provide the analytical lenses. Findings reveal that the Lagos to Kano and Port Harcourt to Enugu railway lines were explicitly designed to funnel groundnut, cotton, tin, and palm produce to coastal ports, creating a radial infrastructure pattern oriented toward Atlantic export rather than internal market integration. This colonial infrastructure geography generated an economic structure characterised by coastal concentration and Northern hinterland dependency that remains visible in contemporary spatial economic inequalities. Keywords: colonial infrastructure, railways, economic development, Nigeria, dependency.