Colonial Zimbabwe's tobacco industry: global, regional and local relations, 1947-1979

The tobacco industry’s centrality to colonial Zimbabwe’s economic and social history is beyond contestation. Scholars converge in acknowledging that tobacco’s profitability was the colony’s key driver of socio-economic and political activities in the post-Second World War era. In addition to financing considerable capital developments, tobacco profits also generated foreign exchange necessary for the development of the colony’s secondary industries. More so, the success of settler tobacco growers triggered increased European immigration into the colony. In turn, this caused increased displacement of Africans from ‘white’ and Crown lands, increased state intervention in African production methods and caused the expansion of the domestic market which stimulated the colony’s fledgling manufacturing sector. Tobacco became the heartbeat of colonial Zimbabwe’s socio-economic and political life. Against this background, this thesis examines colonial Zimbabwe’s tobacco industry from 1947 to 1979, focusing on the shifting interplay of global, regional and local factors shaping the industry. By so doing, the study illuminates the extent to which the development of the local tobacco industry was influenced by the different contexts within which it operated, transcending the parochial emphasis on internal dynamics prevalent in existing literature on the subject. There are two contrasting tendencies dominating settler agriculture literature: an over-emphasis on the role of the state on one hand, and the over-glorification of market forces, and the celebration of the ingenuity of the white settler farmer, on the other. While the two approaches offer different analytic frameworks in the study of settler agriculture, they converge in their similar emphasis on internal dynamics. By contrast, this thesis adopts an analytical integration of local dynamics and post-Second World War imperial-colonial relations which illuminates and explains the shifts in the industry’s fortunes during the period under review. By focusing on the local tobacco industry, and using predominantly archival sources from Zimbabwe and South Africa, this thesis makes a contribution to Zimbabwe’s economic history from the end of the Second World War to the end of settler colonial rule in 1979.