Preface

Summary

My friends and my publisher tell me this is a long book. I think it's too short. It is primarily a book about connections: the ways in which movements among Africans and colonial interventions shaped each other, the relationship of social movements to political struggles in Africa, the interplay between the conceptual schemes of officials and their actions, and the tension of the empire-wide interests and perspectives and the local focus of colonial agents confronting immediate struggles on a daily basis. Focusing on these lines of connection, the book necessarily cannot examine each component part in depth. My analysis recognizes the importance of contexts but does not delve into them; it attempts instead to explain why in a particular moment such movements had a profound impact at the imperial level and how colonial states' efforts to regain the initiative in the 1940s redefined the terrain of struggle, creating new openings and new constraints in which local movements operated in the 1950s. Similarly, a full analysis of the intellectual framework in which labor was discussed in the imperial capitals would require a depth of analysis of metropolitan social movements, social policy, and social science that would make this book even longer. The main concern of this book is how changing structures of ideas both reflected and affected changing struggles in different parts of empire.

This is a book I would not have dared to write until now. I wouldn't have dared to do so had I not already gone through a long period of writing about the social history of a particular African region – the East Coast of Kenya.