Customer Reviews

'So Far and No Further!' Rhodesia's Bid for Independence during the Retreat from Empire 1959-1965

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J.R.T. Wood has accomplished what many current historians fail to do. He has assembled a massive amount of information from diverse sources and analysed a complex series of events to explain why things happened the way the did. His subject is the complex relations between Great Britain, Rhodesia, the Commonwealth, and the world community that lead to the Unilateral Declaration of Indepence on 11 November 1965.

This event was recently recalled in a series of 40-years-on conferences, including one by the London School of Economics in January 2006 (sponsered by the Cold War Studies Centre), that indicates the degree of importance this event had for Great Britain as it divested itself from empire in the period 1959 to 1965. These events were complicted by the Cold War and economic necessities at a time of rising Third World expectations in the lee of the "winds of change."

Richard Wood has done a service in a neglected area of modern history that too often has been made an ideological football rather than a subject for serious analysis. This he has provided from the primary sources of those involved. It is to bad that an institutional sponser has not recognized this and supported the work of what is the first of a proposed three volume study.

This is an indispensible reference for anyone interested in the truth about Rhodesia's declaration of independence in 1965 - the principal personalities and their motivations at the time.

Dr Wood introduces his book with the claim that "Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, has been ill-served by her historians" and that "the economy has been studied without reference to the policy-making in the Cabinet Room".

With privileged access to Ian Smith's Cabinet Papers, Dr Wood's careful study provides new insight into the contrasting positions and ambitions of the Rhodesian and British ministers.