This book is a revised version of my PhD thesis, which was researched between 1976 and 1980 and finally submitted to Cambridge University in 1980. During those four years the focus of the research project broadened from the mere assembly of a data base for parts of the economic history of Kenya and Southern Rhodesia in the colonial period into a critique of certain versions of ‘underdevelopment theory’ which have now become a conventional wisdom for the interpretation of that history. The concepts and empirical validity of ‘underdevelopment theory’, of course, have recently been under scrutiny all over the underdeveloped world, not just in the countries examined here; I therefore hope that the book may have some interest for students of areas other than Eastern and Southern Africa.

Quite the pleasantest part of the job of writing the book is to thank those who helped me do so. I should have been lost without the patient and understanding help of Charles Feinstein in the painful early years of research. My present employer, the University of Bath, financed my visit to the National Archives of Rhodesia in 1978. John Lonsdale, Michael Redley and Carl Keyter helped enormously with encouragement, introductions to unfamiliar material and criticisms of half-baked ideas. The interviewees listed in Section E of the bibliography endured my questions with great courtesy, and filled some vital gaps in the documentary sources.