The Gold Coast, Slave Coast, Pepper Coast were named after the main export resources there. Early uses of the term Gold Coast refer literally to the coast and not the interior. It was not until the 19th century that the term came to refer to areas that are far from the coast. The Gold Coast was to the east of the Ivory Coast and to the west of the Slave Coast.
Ghana is the legal name for the region loosely referred to as the Gold Coast comprising the following four separate parts, which immediately before independence enjoyed distinct constitutional positions:
Europeans reached this region of Africa in 1482, and for centuries afterwards, various European empires and trading companies set up trading posts, known as factories there. They used these colonies to exploit the resources rather than to settle large numbers of subjects. The Portuguese Gold Coast was the first claim. The Dutch arrived in 1598 and in 1642 incorporated the Portuguese territory into the Dutch Gold Coast. The Dutch stayed in the region until 1871, when the last of their settlements were taken over by the British Gold Coast. There was also the Brandenburger Gold Coast, which established a colony in the area in 1682. It later became the Prussian Gold Coast. In 1721 the Dutch purchased it. The Swedish Gold Coast settlements date to 1650. The Danes arrived in 1663 and later seized the Swedish territory and incorporated it into the Danish Gold Coast. In 1850 all of the settlements became part of the British Gold Coast. In 1774 a London commercial expert references a witness that "the king of Guinea, the greatest city in all the countries of Negroland, has a mass of gold of thirty pounds weight as it was naturally produced in the mines which is completely pure, tough and malleable without having been smelted". The British had taken over all of Gold Coast by 1871. They captured more territory inland in the late 19th century after the Anglo-Ashanti wars. In 1957, the territory comprising the Gold Coast Crown Colony, the Ashanti Crown Colony, the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast Protectorate and British Togoland were united as an independent dominion within the British Commonwealth of Nations under the name Ghana.
