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The Politics of Conquest: the British in Western Kenya, 1894–19081

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

J. M. Lonsdale
J. M. Lonsdale
Affiliation:
Trinity College, Cambridge
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Extract

This is a study of a colonial situation in its making, at ground level. It offers an analysis of a forcible process of political accumulation, the means whereby their British conquerors came to terms with the peoples of western Kenya, and a prerequisite for the pursuit of capital accumulation, the appropriation of economic resources from the native peoples of Kenya to the benefit of its British colonists. The case of western Kenya offers no paradigm for the European occupation of the rest of the African continent. Nor can any other case. The relative weights of subjugation and accommodation, of rupture and continuity within conquest – of such great influence on the structure and texture of the colonial era which followed – were governed by too many variables. Brief mention of only four of them will be enough to indicate some of the pitfalls of generalization, even generalization about difference.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 20 , Issue 4 , December 1977 , pp. 841 - 870
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1977

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References

2 Until 1902, the area under study was administered as part of the Eastern Province of Uganda being transferred in that year, along with much other territory, to the East Africa Protectorate, which was to become the Colony of Kenya in 1920.

3 It is intended to explore these further in the concluding chapter of the Cambridge history of Africa, Vol. 6: 1870–1905.

4 As implied in Saul, John S., ‘The State in post-colonial societies: Tanzania’, in Miliband, R. and Savile, J., Socialist Register, 1974 (London, 1974), p. 353.Google Scholar

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33 My thanks to John Iliffe for alerting me to these problems.

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50 To borrow and adapt a phrase from Frykenberg, R. E., Guntur District 1788–1848: a history of local influence and central authority in South India (Oxford, 1965), p. 11.Google Scholar

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54 Ascendancy needed very much the same sort of reinforcement over the Luo in 1899, with the Uyoma-Sakwa-Seme expedition.

55 Compare Cairns, H. A. C., Prelude to imperialism: British reactions to Central African society, 1840–1890 (London, 1965), p. 70.Google Scholar

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61 This conclusion requires more space than can be provided here. It is intended to substantiate it in a larger work on Nyanza now in progress.