Changing Patterns of Indigenous Economic Systems

This book is about the relationships that developed between peasant households in Bungoma district of western Kenya and the strategies that were devised by the British colonial state to incorporate their production and exchange systems into the mainstream of the colonial economy and the wider global economy. The various historical epochs through which this interaction occured include the period before 1930, the 1930s when policy was influenced by the Great Depression, the period punctuated by the Second World War, the immediate post-war period, and finally the period between 1954 and 1960. Each of these periods was peculiar in terms of the agrarian policies privileged by the colonial state in Kenya's rural areas such as Bungoma. While highlighting the centrality of the colonial state in the process of agrarian change and rural transformation, the book also assigns agency to rural cultivators, arguing that the degree of success of statist policies hinged considerably on the extent to which African peasant households were willing to embrace them. This reality underwrote the contradictions characteristic of colonial efforts at agrarian change and rural transformation in western Kenya.