Beyond the State? Organised Settler Tobacco Interests and the Consolidation of Southern Rhodesia’s Tobacco Industry in the Early Post-Second World War Years

Scholars have emphasised the role of the colonial state in explaining the development of white settler agriculture in general and the tobacco industry in particular in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Indeed, through a plethora of laws, ordinances and extra-judicial interventions, the colonial state provided both direct and indirect support, mostly to white farmers at the expense of African interests. More recently, studies have broadened this analysis by foregrounding the post-war global economic climate in seeking to understand the rapid growth of the colony’s tobacco industry in the aftermath of the Second World War. However, in underestimating white farmer agency in the remarkable expansion of the Southern Rhodesian tobacco industry during this period, both strands of literature share a common shortcoming, a gap that this article hopes to fill. Drawing mainly on archival material from the National Archives of Zimbabwe, industry magazines and newspapers, the article reinserts white tobacco growers in conversations on the post-war growth of Southern Rhodesia’s flue-cured Virginia tobacco industry beyond the role played by state support.