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Economic & Social Origins of Mau Mau 1945-53
This story of Kenya in the decade before the outbreak of the Mau Mau emergency presents an integrated view of imperial government as well as examining the social and economic causes of the Kikuyu revolt. Dr. Throup combines traditional Imperial History with its emphasis on the high politics of "The Official Mind" in the Colonial Office or in Government House with the new African historiography that concentrates on the people themselves. Sir Philip Mitchell was the proconsul chosen to reassert metropolitan authority. Under Kenyatta's leadership the Kenya African Union mobilized a popular constituency among the peasantry. In Nairobi the Kikuyu street gangs linked up with the militant Kikuyu tr...
Mortgaging the Ancestors
This title looks briefly at European and North American theories on private property and the mortgage, then shows how these theories have played out as attempted economic reforms in Africa.
Violence in Southern Africa
Violence in southern Africa has occurred in a variety of modes including ethnic confrontation, liberation struggles and cross-border aggression and crime. This volume examines the degree to which violence however defined has influenced political change across the region. The contributions include analyses of the ramifications of violent disorder in Angola and Mozambique, the impact on the political economy of both states and the prospects for lasting peace following the end of civil war.
Worries of the Heart
Growing up in the Maragoli community in Kenya, Kenda Mutongi encountered a perplexing contradiction. While the young teachers at her village school railed against colonialism, many of her elders, including her widowed mother, praised their former British masters. In this moving book, Mutongi explores how both the challenges and contradictions of colonial rule and the frustrations and failures of independence shaped the lives of Maragoli widows and their complex relations with each other, their families, and the larger community. Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, rates of widowhood have been remarkably high in Kenya. Yet despite their numbers, widows and their famili...
Triumph of the Expert
The most striking feature of British colonialism in the twentieth century was the confidence it expressed in the use of science and expertise, especially when joined with the new bureaucratic capacities of the state, to develop natural and human resources of the empire. Triumph of the Expert is a history of British colonial doctrine and its contribution to the emergence of rural development and environmental policies in the late colonial and postcolonial period. Joseph Morgan Hodge examines the way that development as a framework of ideas and institutional practices emerged out of the strategic engagement between science and the state at the climax of the British Empire. Hodge looks intently at the structural constraints, bureaucratic fissures, and contradictory imperatives that beset and ultimately overwhelmed the late colonial development mission in sub-Saharan Africa, south and southeast Asia, and the Caribbean. Triumph of the Expert seeks to understand the quandaries that led up to the important transformation in British imperial thought and practice and the intellectual and administrative legacies it left behind.
Trouble Showed the Way
This extensive study of gender and trade in Nairobi is “a powerful contribution to African social, economic, and women’s history. Highly recommended” (Choice). Herskovitz Award–winner Claire Robertson employs a variety of approaches to analyze and weave together this wide-ranging study. Her book provides a case study of historical transformations in gender, agriculture, residence, and civil society. Based on archival documents, library sources (fiction and nonfiction, primary and secondary), surveys and oral histories, participant observation, and quantitative and qualitative analysis, Robertson breaks new ground by focusing on traders in one commodity, dried staples, and comparing and contrasting the evolution of women’s trade with men’s trade. “An important resource for anyone interested in the history of women and trade in modern Kenya. . . .” —International Journal of African Historical Studies “A landmark study, meticulously executed and written. . . . it will have a wide impact on some of the most significant questions facing the disciplines of history, anthropology, political science, and development economics.” —Gracia Clark
Beyond the Miracle of the Market
As capitalism defeated socialism in Eastern Europe, the market displaced the state in the developing world. In Beyond the Miracle of the Market, first published in 2005, Bates focuses on Kenya, a country that continued to grow while others declined in Africa, and mounts a prescient critique of the neo-classical turn in development economics. Attributing Kenya's exceptionalism to its economic institutions, this book pioneers the use of 'new institutionalism' in the field of development. In doing so, however, the author accuses the approach of being apolitical. Institutions introduce power into economic life. To account for their impact, economic analysis must therefore be complemented by political analysis; micro-economics must be imbedded in political science. In making this argument, Bates relates Kenya's subsequent economic decline to the change from the Kenyatta to the Moi regime and the subsequent use of the power of economic institutions to redistribute rather than to create wealth.
Settler Ecologies
Settler Ecologies tells the story of how settler colonialism becomes memorialized and lives on through ecological relations. Drawing on eight years of research in Laikipia, Kenya, Charis Enns and Brock Bersaglio use immersive methods to reveal how animals and plants can be enrolled in the reproduction of settler colonialism. The book details how ecological relations have been unmade and remade to enable settler colonialism to endure as a structure in this part of Kenya. It describes five modes of violent ecological transformation used to prolong structures of settler colonialism: eliminating undesired wild species; rewilding landscapes with more desirable species to settler ecologists; selec...
Independent Africa
Independent Africa explores Africa's political economy in the first two full decades of independence through the joint projects of nation-building, economic development, and international relations. Drawing on the political careers of four heads of states: Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Ahmed Sékou Touré of Guinea, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Julius Kambarage Nyerere of Tanzania, Independent Africa engages four major themes: what does it mean to construct an African nation-state and what should an African nation-state look like; how does one grow a tropical economy emerging from European colonialism; how to explore an indigenous model of economic development, a "third way," in the context of a Cold War that had divided the world into two camps; and how to leverage internal resources and external opportunities to diversify agricultural economies and industrialize. Combining aspects of history, economics, and political science, Independent Africa examines the important connections between the first generation of African leaders, and the shared ideas that informed their endeavors at nation-building and worldmaking.
The Rise of a Party-State in Kenya
Although Kenya is often considered an African success story, its political climate became increasingly repressive under its second president, Daniel arap Moi. Widner charts the transformation of the Kenya African National Union (KANU) from a weak, loosely organized political party under Jomo Kenyatta into an arm of the president's office, with "watchdog" youth wings and strong surveillance and control functions, under Moi. She suggests that single-party systems have an inherent tendency to become "party-states," or single-party regimes in which the head of state uses the party as a means of control. The speed and extent of these changes depend on the countervailing power of independent interest groups, such as business associations, farmers, or professionals. Widner's study offers important insights into the dynamics of party systems in Africa.
