Commodity relations and class formation in the Zimbabwean countryside, 1898–1920

Abstract

By disaggregating the peasantry, this article seeks to explain the variety of experience uncovered by previous local studies of the Zimbabwean countryside. A combination of those pockets of pre‐colonial accumulation which had survived the violence of the 1890s, and the productive reinvestment of income earned in wage labour, gave rise to a distinctive pattern of rural differentiation. By the start of the 1920s a class of small farmers had emerged.

Notes

Department of Economic History, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7700, Cape Town, South Africa.