This book examines the relationships between organised secondary industry, the state, and other economic interest groups (farmers, miners, and commerce) during the industrialisation of Southern Rhodesia (colonial Zimbabwe) between 1890 and 1979. Using diverse and fresh archival material that includes minutes and reports of industrialists’ congresses, industrial journals, business newspapers, legislative debates, and government and commissions of enquiries’ reports, it demonstrates that this relationship was conflictual, uneven, and irregular, and often shifted depending on time and context. The book argues that the great expansion and diversification of industry which took place were attributable, among other factors, to the efforts of private entrepreneurs.

Industrialists galvanised and formed representative organisations, starting with the Salisbury and Bulawayo Manufacturers’ Association (c.1920), which then evolved into the Salisbury and Bulawayo Chambers of Industry (c.1930s), the Association of Chambers of Industries of Rhodesia (1941–1949), the Federation of Rhodesia Industries (1949–1957), the Association of Rhodesia and Nyasaland Industries (1957–1964), and the Association of Rhodesian Industries (1964–1979). These organisations engaged the state in pursuit of industrial development. Often, industrialist associations’ requests, demands, and suggestions were opposed, if not dismissed, by the government and other economic interest groups, and yet, remarkably, secondary industries expanded. By privileging the voice of industrialists which hitherto has been neglected in the historiography, the book moves beyond the existing scholarship’s emphasis on the actions of the state in the industrialisation of colonial Zimbabwe through planning, regulation, and establishment of major industries of national importance. While this existing analysis is correct, it is incomplete.

Between 1890 and 1965, farmers, miners, and commerce, with the state’s support, believed in the supremacy of the primary exporting industries of agriculture and mining in propelling the economy of Southern Rhodesia. As we will see, the state adopted the policy of ‘imperial preference’. It opened the colony for imports of manufactured goods from other parts of the British Empire in return for market opportunities for the primary products. This policy deliberately favoured the mining and agricultural sectors. It also sacrificed industrial interests in negotiating trade agreements, thus depriving the secondary industry of tariff protection. Further, the state routinely accepted advice which labelled the manufacturing sector as of secondary importance to mining and agriculture.