Zambia, formerly Northern Rhodesia, enters the book as part of a larger account of how European commercial and colonial expansion altered the paths of societies beyond Europe. The territory’s colonial-era formation is tied to the northward advance of Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company, an expansion that helped turn land and political power into instruments of extraction. In the book’s comparative argument, this history belongs to a wider pattern: the same expansion that fostered institutional change and growth in Britain could impose institutions that obstructed development elsewhere.

A territory in Rhodes’s expansion

In 1889, the British South Africa Company began expanding north out of South Africa, expropriating extensive territories that would eventually become Northern and Southern Rhodesia, now Zambia and Zimbabwe. Zambia is thus presented not as an isolated case but as part of a territorial project extending across southern Africa. The expansion joined corporate power to colonial acquisition: a company established to pursue commercial aims became an agent through which land was taken and political control extended.

Commercial expansion and institutional change

The book places this territorial advance against the broader rise of Atlantic and overseas trade. From the early seventeenth century, European companies increasingly sought control over valuable commerce, sometimes using military force and colonial rule to exclude competitors. In Southeast Asia, for example, the Dutch East India Company used its army to enforce monopolies and intensify systems of tribute and forced labor. The book treats these episodes, together with the later expansion of the British South Africa Company in southern Africa, as examples of a wider process in which European commercial expansion could reshape local institutions for extraction rather than broad-based prosperity.

Zambia in the argument about development

The book’s central contrast is between the institutional effects of expansion in Europe and in colonized regions. In England, overseas trade helped create a wealthy group of traders less dependent on the Crown, who demanded changes to political institutions and restrictions on royal prerogative. In many places reached by European colonial power, however, expansion destroyed or constrained indigenous commercial and political possibilities, or reinforced extractive arrangements that obstructed industrialization. Zambia’s identification as one of the territories carved out through the company’s northward expansion makes it part of this account of development redirected by external power.

The account also marks the limits of certainty: it does not establish what Zambia’s trajectory would have been without that expansion. Its broader point is that colonial intervention could remove or narrow alternative paths, while the institutions imposed or strengthened through empire helped determine who could benefit from later technological change. Zambia therefore figures in the book less as a detailed national history than as a place within the larger geography of colonial rule and uneven development.