The establishment of European settler societies overseas has over the decades received considerable scholarly attention. Much of the research has focused on the “New World” and the European offshoots. Different from these, the expansion of settler societies in Africa took a large place in the latter part of the nineteenth century, a period that coincided with rapid global economic integration, but also the beginning of the end of the golden age of settler societies. Once settled in Africa, the Europeans faced the challenge of establishing profitable business under conditions characterized by falling terms of trade, volatile global markets and eventually increased protectionism. It should therefore come as no surprise that cases of sustained profitable European businesses was exceptional in colonial Africa. This was especially true for the farming sector. While the general failure of European farming in colonial Africa has been addressed in the literature there is less written about the successful cases, especially from a comparative perspective. This chapter focuses on three such cases, namely European controlled tea production in colonial Malawi (Nyasaland from here), coffee production in colonial Kenya (Kenya from here) and tobacco production in colonial Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia from here). The three cases differ greatly in terms of the character of the European settler societies and colonial policies. Despite these differences, they show remarkable similarities in the performance of European settler agriculture. After a turbulent initial period, when undercapitalized European farmers tried but failed to establish profitable agriculture, the situation improved. By the mid-1930s, profitable European agriculture had been established in all three cases.

What were the reasons behind these successes? In the literature the success of European agriculture in colonial Africa is commonly explained by domestic factors. More specifically, by the implementation of labor policies that shifted the local supply of African labor upwards. In their seminal work, Elkins and Pedersen argue that a chief difference between the settler societies established in the pre-industrial age and those established after the mid-nineteenth century was that the former was characterized by the logic of elimination of indigenous populations and direct coercion (slavery), while the latter, to a large degree, became dependent on the local populations to ensure labor supply. Although repressive measures were employed from time to time the systematic use of direct coercion was finite.