This article explores the interaction of settler farmers, miners, and the state in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) from 1895 to 1923. The governing authority, the British South Africa Company (BSAC), was a private commercial mining entity, which sought to maximise its earnings through mining, particularly gold extraction. Its mining bias set the stage for subseque...

This paper uses miner-farmer relations in post-1923 Southern Rhodesia as a lens to delineate the protean nature of state policy in dealing with sectorial interests of the two foremost primary sectors of the country's economy, highlighting how agriculture eventually toppled mining from the apex position by 1945 ? both economically and politically. It discusses how g...