This important book is the first in-depth history of the Rhodesian railway system. Covering the period 1888-1947, when the Rhodesian railway system was privately owned by Cecil Rhode's British South Africa Company, this book uses the Rhodesian railway system as a prism through which it refracts many dimensions of the imperial experience in central and southern Africa, ranging from the impulses underpinning the regional ambitions of Rhodes himself to the origins of black worker protest in the Rhodesias.

A key book on Zimbabwe's industrial policy and the relationship between manufacturing, the state, and economic interest groups.

This is a study of the evolving relationship between the British colonial state and the copper mining industry in Northern Rhodesia, from the early stages of development to decolonization, encompassing depression, wartime mobilization and fundamental changes in the nature and context of colonial rule.

This collection presents rare documents relating to the development of various forms of communication across Africa by the British, as part of their economic investment in Africa. Railways and waterways are examined.

This book offers the first comprehensive history of white workers from the end of the First World War to Zimbabwean independence in 1980. It reveals how white worker identity was constituted, examines the white labouring class as an ethnically and nationally heterogeneous formation comprised of both men and women, and emphasises the active participation of white workers in the ongoing and contested production of race. White wage labourers' experiences, both as exploited workers and as part of the privileged white minority, offer insight into how race and class co-produced one another and how boundaries fundamental to settler colonialism were regulated and policed. Based on original research conducted in Zimbabwe, South Africa and the UK, this book offers a unique theoretical synthesis of work on gender, whiteness studies, labour histories, settler colonialism, Marxism, emotions and the New African Economic History.

In The Objects of Life in Central Africa the history of consumption and social change from 1840 until 1980 is explored. By taking consumption as a vantage point, the contributions deviate from and add to previous works which have mainly analysed issues of production from an economic and political perspective. The chapters are broad-ranging in temporal and geographical focus, including contributions on Congo, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Angola. Topics range from the social history of firearms to the perception of the railway and include contributions on sewing machines, traders and advertising. By looking at the socio-economic, political and cultural meaning and impact of goods the history of Central Africa is reassessed.