In the early years of European colonisation, mining and agriculture were the bases of the Rhodesian colonial economy and manufacturing was virtually non-existent. This study traces the origins and early development of the sector in the inter-war years and its rapid growth during the second world war and the Central African Federation years. It also analyses the fortunes of the manufacturing industry in the troubled Unilateral Declaration of Independence years when international economic sanctions and an escalation of and debilitating war of liberation threatened the sector. Finally the book examines developments in the post-colonial period up to, and including, the years of the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme of the 1990s.