Food and Famine in Colonial Kenya

Food and Famine in Colonial Kenya
Author: James Duminy
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2022-10-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 3031109643

This book offers a genealogical critique of how food scarcity was governed in colonial Kenya. With an approach informed by the ‘analysis of government’, the study accounts for the emergence and persistence of dominant approaches to promoting food security in Kenya and elsewhere in Africa – policies and practices that prioritize increased agricultural production as the principal means of achieving food security. Drawing on a range of archival sources, the book investigates how those tasked with governing colonial Kenya confronted food as a particular kind of problem. It emphasizes the ways in which that problem shifted in conjunction with the emergence and consolidation of the colonial state and economic relations in the territory. The book applies a novel conceptual approach to the historical study of African food systems and famine, and provides the first longitudinal and in-depth analysis of the dynamics of food scarcity and its government in Kenya.

Mass Starvation

Mass Starvation
Author: Alex de Waal
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2017-12-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1509524703

The world almost conquered famine. Until the 1980s, this scourge killed ten million people every decade, but by early 2000s mass starvation had all but disappeared. Today, famines are resurgent, driven by war, blockade, hostility to humanitarian principles and a volatile global economy. In Mass Starvation, world-renowned expert on humanitarian crisis and response Alex de Waal provides an authoritative history of modern famines: their causes, dimensions and why they ended. He analyses starvation as a crime, and breaks new ground in examining forced starvation as an instrument of genocide and war. Refuting the enduring but erroneous view that attributes famine to overpopulation and natural disaster, he shows how political decision or political failing is an essential element in every famine, while the spread of democracy and human rights, and the ending of wars, were major factors in the near-ending of this devastating phenomenon. Hard-hitting and deeply informed, Mass Starvation explains why man-made famine and the political decisions that could end it for good must once again become a top priority for the international community.

The Story of an African Famine

The Story of an African Famine
Author: Megan Vaughan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 1987-04-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521329170

This account of the 1949 famine in colonial Malawi employs a wide variety of historical sources, ranging from Colonial Office documentation to the songs of women who lived through the tragedy. The analysis of the causes and development of the famine takes the reader through a detailed agricultural and social history of Southern Malwai in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing in particular on the nature of social and economic stratification, changes in kinship systems and the position of women and placing all this within the wider context of the impact of colonial rule.

Hungry Nation

Hungry Nation
Author: Benjamin Robert Siegel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2018-04-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108695051

This ambitious and engaging new account of independent India's struggle to overcome famine and malnutrition in the twentieth century traces Indian nation-building through the voices of politicians, planners, and citizens. Siegel explains the historical origins of contemporary India's hunger and malnutrition epidemic, showing how food and sustenance moved to the center of nationalist thought in the final years of colonial rule. Independent India's politicians made promises of sustenance and then qualified them by asking citizens to share the burden of feeding a new and hungry state. Foregrounding debates over land, markets, and new technologies, Hungry Nation interrogates how citizens and politicians contested the meanings of nation-building and citizenship through food, and how these contestations receded in the wake of the Green Revolution. Drawing upon meticulous archival research, this is the story of how Indians challenged meanings of welfare and citizenship across class, caste, region, and gender in a new nation-state.

Britain's Gulag

Britain's Gulag
Author: Caroline Elkins
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 437
Release: 2023-09-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1448162734

Only a few years after Britain defeated fascism came the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya - a mass armed rebellion by the Kikuyu people, demanding the return of their land and freedom. The draconian response of Britain's colonial government was to detain nearly the entire Kikuyu population of 1.5 million and to portray them as sub-human savages. Detainees in their thousands - possibly a hundred thousand or more - died from exhaustion, disease, starvation and systemic physical brutality. For decades these events remained untold. Caroline Elkins conducted years of research to piece together this story, unearthing reams of documents and interviewing several hundred Kikuyu survivors. Britain's Gulag reveals, for the first time, the full savagery of the Mau Mau war and the ruthless determination with which Britain sought to control its empire.

Famine

Famine
Author: Cormac Ó Gráda
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2009
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780691122373

History.

From Colonialism to International Aid

From Colonialism to International Aid
Author: Carina Schmitt
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 396
Release: 2020-06-29
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3030382001

This open access volume addresses the role of external actors in social protection in the Global South, from the Second World War until today, analysing the influence of colonial powers, superpowers during the Cold War and contemporary donor agencies. Following an introduction to the analysis of external actors in social policy making in the Global South, the contributions explore which external actors were dominant in the decades after World War II, and how they shaped early and contemporary social protection making in developing countries. The latter half of the collection elucidates important players in the contemporary transnational social policy arena, such as donor organizations and international organizations, and critically evaluates the potential for and limits of the explanatory power of external actors in social protection making in the Global South, considering the relative contribution of external and domestic influences. By examining how transnational relationships and external actors have influenced the formation, development and transformation of social policies in the developing world, this collection will be an invaluable resource for scholars interested in social protection in the Global South from a range of disciplines. These include political science, social policy, and sociology, as well as historians of the welfare state, international relations scholars and scholars working on global and transnational social policy and development policy.

Race and Empire

Race and Empire
Author: Chloe Campbell
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2007-06-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780719071607

Race and Empire tells the story of a short-lived but vehement eugenics movement that emerged among a group of Europeans in Kenya in the 1930s, unleashing a set of writings on racial differences in intelligence more extreme than that emanating from any other British colony in the twentieth century. The Kenyan eugenics movement of the 1930s adapted British ideas to the colonial environment: in all its extremity, Kenyan eugenics was not simply a bizarre and embarrassing colonial mutation, as it was later dismissed, but a logical extension of British eugenics in a colonial context. By tracing the history of eugenic thought in Kenya, the books shows how the movement took on a distinctive colonial character, driven by settler political preoccupations and reacting to increasingly outspoken African demands for better, and more independent, education. The economic fragility of Kenya in the early 1930s made the eugenicists particularly dependent on British financial support. Ultimately, the suspicious response of the Colonial Office and the Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, backed up by a growing expert concern about race in science, led to the failure of Kenyan eugenics to gain the necessary British backing. Despite this lack of concrete success, eugenic theories on race and intelligence were widely supported by the medical profession in Kenya, as well as powerful members of the official and non-official European settler population. The long-term failures of the eugenics movement should not blind us to its influence among the social and administrative elite of colonial Kenya. Through a close examination of attitudes towards race and intelligence in a British colony, Race and Empire reveals how eugenics was central to colonial racial theories before World War Two.