The origins and development of secondary industry in Southern Rhodesia between 1890 and 1938 need to be outlined if the clamour and debate over local industry that emerged in the ensuing years of the Second World War are to be understood. While this gestation period of secondary industrial development has received considerable scholarly attention, this chapter discusses in particular the way in which the peripheral emergence of secondary industry amid opposition from mining and agricultural interests during the first forty-eight years of the colony reveals tensions in settler colonialism.

First, there were conflicts between local and national capital and international capital. Local capital, largely comprising rural owner-workers of small and medium-sized mines and farmers, formed the base of the capitalist sector and was committed to the economic development of the country. ‘This national character of the white rural bourgeoisie’, trenchantly explained Giovanni Arrighi,

Second, there was also antagonism within the settler society itself, as reflected by the continuous conflicts among the various interest groups, notably miners, farmers, commerce, and industrialists. These intra-settler relations were crucial in shaping the Rhodesian economy and politics in general and industrial development in particular. Hence, ‘the path of capitalist development followed by Southern Rhodesia’, argued Arrighi, ‘is intelligible only if due attention is paid to divisions within settler society and between economic sectors’. The conversation over the overall economic trajectory of the colony was underpinned by these differing interests. This marked the beginning of the notion of societal corporatism, as the state and economic interest groups (whose cordiality was indispensable) negotiated, adopted, and implemented policies for the success of the colonial project. The following paragraphs discuss the early foundations of the Rhodesian economy, highlighting the competing views of the different economic sectors and the unfolding societal corporatism as agriculture, commerce, and mining received state recognition and thereby achieved monopoly over industrialists.