The history of southern Angola and northern South West Africa during the period of colonial conquest (1875-1915) has been reexamined from a predominantly economic angle. In the arid coastal strip the fisheries and sma11 plantations went through alternating periods of boom and slump, white settler society became increasingly stratified and a concealed form of black slave labour was maintained until 1913. In the Huila highlands Portuguese settlers from Madeira eked out a meagre living from subsistence farming, Boer trekkers from the Transvaal built up an important transport riding business and the indigenous Mwila inhabitants fought a long and bitter struggle to prevent white encroachments on their lands. In the Ovambo and Okavango flood plains the Africans built up a flourishing raiding and trading economy supplemented by migrant labour, underwent rapid social stratification and resisted European conquest. In a number of large campaigns which only ended in 1915. In the southern fringes of the Ovimbundu highlands most of the trade routes went to Benguela, but Mossamedes benefitted from the great boom in the export of root rubber between 1886 and 1913. This was also the area where the French catholic missionaries had their greatest success among peoples raided by the Ovambo. Over the whole of the hinterland of Moossamedes the policies followed by the Portuguese administration were often dictated by financial or political considerations which had little to do with local conditions and were often linked to financial crises at home or to frontier disputes with Germany and Britain. The general conclusion drawn from the thaesis is that the period of colonial conquest needs to be analysed with more complex social categories than the usual ones of colonisers and colonised or collaborators and resisters.