[6] With the arrival of Europeans on the coast, the Nembe kingdom became a trading state, but was relatively poor compared to Bonny and Calabar.

[7][8] The Nembe slave trade picked up in the second quarter of the 19th century when the British attempted to suppress slave-trading in Africa by blockading the ports of Bonny and Calabar.

[7] After 1884, the Nembe kingdom was included in the area over which the British claimed sovereignty as part of the Oil Rivers Protectorate.

[6] In January 1895 the Nembe King William Koko led a dawn attack of more than a thousand warriors on the company's headquarters at Akassa.

This triggered a retaliatory raid in which an expeditionary[11] force led by Sir Frederick Bedford captured and sacked Nembe, occurring concurrently with a devastating[12] outbreak of smallpox in the Kingdom.