‘Our Greater Rhodesia’: Settler Aspirations, Indigenous Fears, and Whitehall Concerns Regarding Amalgamation, 1919–1945

Charlton Cussans

doi:10.1080/02582473.2025.2608307

‘Our Greater Rhodesia’: Settler Aspirations, Indigenous Fears, and Whitehall Concerns Regarding Amalgamation, 1919–1945

Charlton Cussans

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Abstract

In the interwar period, and even into the Second World War, white Southern and Northern Rhodesians tried and failed to ‘amalgamate’ their colonies. An examination of this failure allows useful lessons to be drawn about the divergences and differences between colonial and metropolitan opinion regarding the purpose of the British Empire and the relationship between coloniser and colonised. The British Empire, ultimately, was defined by sets of interlocking contradictions. These contradictions were between the interests and demands of white settlers, metropolitan colonial officials, and the black African subjects.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	(In-Press)
Number of pages	20
Journal	South African Historical Journal
Volume	(In-Press)
Early online date	16 Feb 2026
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1080/02582473.2025.2608307
Publication status	E-pub ahead of print - 16 Feb 2026

Bibliographical note

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivativesLicense (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

Keywords

British world
Northern Rhodesia
Settler colonialism
Southern Rhodesia
amalgamation
imperialism

ASJC Scopus subject areas

History

Access to Document

10.1080/02582473.2025.2608307Licence: CC BY-NC-ND

Our Greater Rhodesia Settler Aspirations Indigenous Fears and Whitehall Concerns Regarding Amalgamation 1919 1945Final published version, 1.09 MBLicence: CC BY-NC-ND

Cite this

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‘Our Greater Rhodesia’: Settler Aspirations, Indigenous Fears, and Whitehall Concerns Regarding Amalgamation, 1919–1945

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

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