Global coffee markets entered into a deep cyclical downturn from the mid 1950s. As producers, notably Brazil and Colombia, continued to increase their output, intense struggles arose among global competitors for larger slices of a contracting market. The prospect of an economic catastrophe, following the release of Brazil's surplus stocks, preoccupied Kenya's colonial government, which was dependent on tax revenues derived from coffee sales, and was less able to support the settler-dominated industry in the face of the increased costs incurred by the Mau Mau Emergency after 1952. This left European settlers exposed, with many barely able to recover their costs of production. What began as a counter-insurgency strategy, by allowing an elite of African farmers to grow Arabica coffee (a privilege formerly reserved to settlers) was enlarged and accelerated in response to unrelenting global market pressures. These compelled the colonial government to beckon low-cost African farmers into coffee production, in a bid to save its tax base and ensure the survival of the coffee sector. Even though the Coffee Marketing Board confiscated much of their income, African farmers proved well able to rally family labour and achieve surpluses. Rationalization of production and the re-organization of the commodity chain to maintain high quality at lower cost were decisive in both reconfiguring the economic and social relationships that underpinned Kenya's independence in 1963 and securing the country's place on the world market. The aim here is to explain the crisis, and its grip on Kenya's economy during the transition to independence and beyond.

Cain and Hopkins' influential theory of British imperialism opted for a metropolitan-based model of explanation, rooted in the interests of a City-of-London-based class of ‘gentlemanly capitalists’, and discounting in the process events and experiences in the colonies and the significance of industrialization. By focusing on the simultaneous emergence of Bombay and Glasgow as modern, global ports in the second half of the nineteenth century, this article argues, in diametrical opposition, for a fresh perspective on the relationship between metropole and periphery, based on the concept of ‘interconnected synchronicity‘. This proposes that ‘imperial’ causation be viewed, at least from this period, as occurring in both arenas, based on a set of related and mutually transformative processes generated by the ‘globalizing’, commodity-driven imperatives of industrial capitalism.