By the late nineteenth century, Cecil John Rhodes envisioned an unbroken corridor of British territory running from Cape Town to Cairo. Through his commercial vehicle, the British South Africa Company (BSAC), Rhodes secured mining concessions through deceptive treaties, such as the 1888 Rudd Concession signed by King Lobengula of the Ndebele. BSAC forces subsequently marched north, deploying Maxim machine guns to crush local resistance across the plateau.
In 1895, the company officially designated its conquered territories "Rhodesia." By 1911, the vast territory split administratively along the natural fissure of the Zambezi River into Northern Rhodesia and Southern Rhodesia. Northern Rhodesia fell under direct British Colonial Office rule as a protectorate in 1924, focused heavily on extracting the vast copper deposits of the Copperbelt. Southern Rhodesia developed along a divergent, harsher trajectory: it became a self-governing British crown colony dominated by an entrenched white settler minority that expropriated the fertile highveld through the Land Apportionment Act of 1930.
