The role of foreign trade in the Rozvi empire

A reappraisal

Datos Bibliográficos

ID8978080
AutoresS I Mudenge (University of Botswana, autor de correspondencia)
Año1974
Volumen15
Número3
Páginas373-391
Fecha de publicación1974-07-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaThe Journal of African History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0021-8537 • E-ISSN: 1469-5138
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0021853700013542
OpenAlexW2059500522
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas31
Referencias citadas12

Recent studies by the historians of pre-colonial Africa have tended to assume that external trade has always led to the formation or enlargement of states, and was crucial for the continued existence of these states. An example where an uncritical application of the above ‘trade-stimulus hypothesis’ has led to some distortion of reality has been in the study of the Rozvi empire in Southern Rhodesia in the eighteenth century. Previous students of the Rozvi empire have claimed that the latter was such a loosely connected tribal confederacy that its internal power bases—given as military and religious—were politically so slender that on their own they could not have sustained whatever power the Rozvi ruler wielded. Instead, it is said that the main source of the power exercised by the Rozvi Mambo came mainly from the latter's ability to redistribute the profits of external trade, especially that of the gold trade of which he is said to have had a strictly enforced monopoly

Ancient history · Colonialism · Economics · Empire · Market economy · Monopoly · Political economy · Political science · Power (physics · Ruler · Stimulus (psychology · African history and culture studies · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law · Psychology