ABSTRACT
A worldwide ranking of countries for the early 1920s, starting with the most economically backward, would certainly find Northern Rhodesia near the beginning of the Hst. 1 Economic life tor most of the nearly one million Africans was not too different from .the primitive state that David Livingstone observed during his famous journeys through the territory seventy years earlier.2 Europeans (only 3,000 lived there in 1921) had achieved remarka:ble results in eliminating the slave trade. preventing tribal wars, and spreading Ohristianity, but the economy was still such that more than 96 per cent of the population lived in the rural subsistence sector.
