The Politics of Conquest: the British in Western Kenya, 1894–1908

Abstract

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.