Northern Rhodesia

A territory that existed because of what lay under it. The British South Africa Company, Cecil Rhodes's chartered company, administered the land north of the Zambezi from the 1890s while looking for a second Rand, and the two halves it created - North-Western and North-Eastern Rhodesia - were amalgamated in 1911. The Colonial Office took over in 1924, by which point the company had found no gold but retained the mineral rights, which it kept collecting royalties on until 1964. What was found instead, from the late 1920s, was copper: a belt of exceptionally rich deposits along the Congo border that turned a neglected protectorate into one of the most valuable properties in the empire. The Copperbelt shaped everything. It drew African labour into mining towns under a colour bar that reserved skilled work for white workers, produced one of Africa's earliest and best organised trade union movements, and generated revenue that was largely spent elsewhere. In 1953 Britain folded the territory into the Central African Federation with Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, an arrangement that African opinion in the north read correctly as a mechanism for routing copper income to Salisbury and extending white settler rule northwards. Opposition to the Federation, rather than to colonial rule in the abstract, became the organising cause of Northern Rhodesian politics and made Kenneth Kaunda's United National Independence Party. The Federation was dissolved on the last day of 1963. Independence followed on 24 October 1964 as Zambia, with the mineral royalties finally bought out and a one-commodity economy that the copper price collapse of the mid-1970s would leave badly exposed.

• Type: Polity
• Government: Colonial administration