Pre-war Northern Rhodesia: the structural weaknesses of colonial control -- Labour recruitment and mobilisation: the roots of crisis -- Advent of a "white man's war": early implications for the survival of white supremacy -- Colonial dependence and African opportunity: the indigenous response to war exigencies -- Crumbling colonial foundations: chiefs and headmen at war -- The strain of total war: a colonial state in retreat -- The nadir of colonial power in Northern Rhodesia -- Re-conquest and reconstruction
Summary
Britain, Northern Rhodesia and the First World War is an insightful account of the devastating impact of the Great War, upon the already fragile British colonial African state of Northern Rhodesia. Using extensive official and private records from Britain and Zambia and the testimonies of a few surviving African veterans, Edmund Yorke investigates how rapidly rising imperial war demands caused immense distress and discontent amongst the African population. With widespread famine, spiraling death rates and demands for thousands more African carriers and soldiers, this book examines how African resistance rapidly mounted. Examples of rising African desertion rates and mass refusal to pay colonial taxes as well as direct defiance of military recruiters are highlighted, as are brutal reprisals by both military and some colonial officials; eventually revealing how, finally, only news from Europe of the arrival of the Armistice saved Northern Rhodesia from total collapse
