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1975 | Buch

An Economic History of Kenya and Uganda 1800–1970

verfasst von: R. M. A. van Zwanenberg, Anne King

Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan UK

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Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

People

Frontmatter
1. A History of Population Growth in Kenya and Uganda
Abstract
Economic history is the study of people and their way of life; it is concerned with all the people, not simply the rulers or decision-makers, and it is therefore very important that economic historians should know about the number of people in the community they are studying; in other words, they must concern themselves with the size of the population. As historians they also need to know how the size of the population has changed over time; has it increased in size, or decreased, and even more important, why and how have the increases or decreases occurred? This chapter will attempt to answer some of these questions.
R. M. A. van Zwanenberg, Anne King

Production

Frontmatter
2. Agricultural Change in Kenya and Uganda: A Comparison
Abstract
We shall begin this chapter with an account of nineteenth-century land use and land tenurial practices. Land use covers the ways in which people farm their land, the techniques of digging the ground, the division of labour between men and women and the rotations of crops to ensure the continuing fertility of the land. Land tenure defines a person’s rights in holding property. Land rights were usually directly related to an individual’s connections by kin. The kinship system and the land holding system were closely connected, so that any man’s or any woman’s right to produce food from the soil was dependent on his relationships with other members of his particular community.
R. M. A. van Zwanenberg, Anne King
3. Agriculture in Kenya: Large- versus Small-Scale Farming
Abstract
Before we embark on a chronological account of the changes and developments in Kenya’s agriculture it would be helpful to look at the structural changes brought about by the setting up of large-scale agricultural estates by European settlers. The history of development or lack of development in the rural areas of Kenya has been largely determined by the imposition of this type of farming on the country. Did the kind of agriculture brought by the settlers lead to development? The following sections will show that after forty difficult years it brought about prosperity within the European-settled areas, but that it was directly responsible for (a) holding back agricultural development in other areas, (b) the political explosion in the 1950s, (c) creating the ‘peasant capitalist’ from the late 1950s and finally (d) the gross underdevelopment in the areas of the nomadic pastoralists.
R. M. A. van Zwanenberg, Anne King
4. Agriculture in Uganda: Change without Development
Abstract
In comparison with Kenya, the history of land and agriculture in Uganda in the twentieth century has been less dramatic. The difference was due to two factors:
(i)
white settlement failed in Uganda;
 
(ii)
there has always been at least twice as much high-quality land in Uganda as in Kenya.
 
R. M. A. van Zwanenberg, Anne King
5. Nomadic Pastoralism: the Process of Impoverishment
Abstract
Few historical studies have been made of the nomadic pastoral peoples of East Africa and consequently we know little about their past, even in the nineteenth century. Such studies as have been made have concentrated on the broad sweep of the history of migration of pastoralists or on their recent political past and little attention has been paid to their economic or social histories. For information in these fields we have to turn to the work of anthropologists, but use of this source itself provides problems for the historian. Anthropologists, who are concerned with the economic and social aspects of the societies they are studying, tend to concentrate on the current structures and functions of social and economic institutions. As a result the view of life they present tends to be timeless and to give an impression that things have not altered, unless the studies are specifically concerned to examine change in the society. Existing studies of nomadic pastoralists in Eastern Africa, give an impression of timelessness — that methods of production in the precolonial period have hardly altered and that in modern times change has passed these societies by.
R. M. A. van Zwanenberg, Anne King
6. Nineteenth-Century Craft Industries
Abstract
The industry in hand-made goods in nineteenth-century East Africa is important because such goods were vital to society, supplementing and complementing agricultural and pastoral activities. For example, iron hoes were used by all agricultural communities. Weapons, such as iron spears, were also important. The people with the more skilful blacksmiths, who could forge the sharpest and longest-lasting swords, had a distinct advantage over people without such craftsmen. Salt was another essential commodity produced on a small scale. A great deal of salt was available from local natural sources, for example salt was extracted from the water of salt lakes or dug from the shores. Salt was traded over considerable distances but supplies were irregular especially for those people who did not have a suitable natural source of salt in their neighbourhood. As a substitute a great deal of salt was manufactured from plants, leaves and earths. But our knowledge of how the extraction processes, of which there were probably quite a number, were carried out is still very limited.
R. M. A. van Zwanenberg, Anne King
7. Industrialisation in the Twentieth Century
Abstract
The basis of the wealth of the western capitalist world and Soviet Russia, wealth which has been created over the last hundred and fifty years, has been the rapid growth of manufacturing industry (which for convenience we can call ‘industrialisation’). All societies, however simple their technology, manufacture some goods which include clothes and tools for production and defence. During the last two hundred years or so we have learnt how to manufacture not only the old things which people have always wanted, like clothes, on a vast scale, but also new things like motor cars and aeroplanes, which our forefathers never even dreamt about. We have learnt how to produce all these things by understanding our material environment. Men have always understood their environment to some extent; those aspects which they could not explain in material terms, they explained in terms of the working of supernatural powers. But it has only been since the time of a scientific understanding of the material environment that man has been able to consciously manipulate it in order to produce the goods he wanted. The difference between an historical understanding of the physical environment and a scientific understanding is as follows.
R. M. A. van Zwanenberg, Anne King

Exchange and Distribution

Frontmatter
8. African Trade in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Abstract
In this chapter we shall be looking at the patterns of trade which have been predominantly controlled by Africans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In reality, we cannot isolate African trade patterns from others in either century; African and Arab trade patterns overlapped and intertwined in the nineteenth, while in the twentieth African, Asian and European trade patterns were divided on a racial basis, until just before political Independence. Incoming foreigners have therefore stimulated, as well as severely limited, African trade in both centuries. But for purposes of historical analysis, it is useful to look at the African dominated patterns of trade alone for the following reasons.
R. M. A. van Zwanenberg, Anne King
9. Nineteenth-Century Arab Trade: the Growth of a Commercial Empire
Abstract
The expansion of Arab caravans and Arab personnel into the interior of East Africa throughout the nineteenth century was in a sense the first stage of imperialism which was to transform the face of Africa in the twentieth century. Nineteenth-century Arab trade did not produce such radical changes as the European imperial trade which followed. The technology of transport was still based on human muscle power, the main export goods were ivory and human beings which were exchanged for cloth and a few iron goods. The Arabs were concerned almost exclusively with the export-import trade. Unlike the Europeans they did not have the physical means to set up central government controls in any part of Eastern Africa. Yet, despite this lack of innovation, by the 1880s there were very few areas that had not been influenced by the Arabs’ activities in one way or another.
R. M. A. van Zwanenberg, Anne King
10. Foreign Trade in the Twentieth Century
Abstract
In the previous two chapters we have dealt with two types of trade of the nineteenth century, the patterns of internal African trade and external Arab—African trade. The chapter on the latter has illustrated the mechanics of the trade which initially opened East Africa to the goods of an industrialising Europe. The Arab incursions into Eastern Africa were, in a sense, the first stage in economic integration of the area with Europe. The second stage of this economic integration came with colonisation. The introduction of crops for export — cotton, coffee, sisal, tea, pyrethrum and a few others — provided the means of earning foreign exchange, mainly sterling. With this cash East African communities began to import a wide range of goods manufactured in Europe, such as motor cars, whisky and fertilisers.
R. M. A. van Zwanenberg, Anne King
11. Marketing and Distribution
Abstract
What is marketing and why is it important for the process of production? Marketing is the vital link which connects the producer to the consumer. This link is of crucial importance in all economies because without a marketing mechanism, the producer’s surplus crops rot in the field. In economies which are strongly orientated towards external trade as is the case of East Africa, it is the marketing mechanism which connects the producer to the world market, and which, as will be shown in this chapter, supports the producer against world price fluctuations dealt with in the previous chapter.
R. M. A. van Zwanenberg, Anne King
12. East Africa and Economic Federation: the East African Common Market
Abstract
Why have so many people considered it desirable to federate the countries of East Africa? The idea of creating a larger economic and political unit from the existing separate sovereign countries of East Africa has a history of almost one hundred years. Let us first examine the financial reasons which make the larger political and economic units desirable before we turn to the history of the East African federation itself.
R. M. A. van Zwanenberg, Anne King

Institutions from Economic Growth

Frontmatter
13. Urbanisation
Abstract
… Kenya’s urban population in the short space of 28 years will have swollen from its present level to 9,000,000 (the total population of the country in 1969 was only 10·5 million)… Problems of urban poverty and unemployment, of inadequacy of housing and urban infrastructure have been recorded throughout history. What most distinguishes the current urban problems… is their scale and intensity. The severity of the problems reflects primarily the rapidity of overall population growth and the acute shortage of resources.
R. M. A. van Zwanenberg, Anne King
14. Money and Banking
Abstract
In this chapter we shall examine the history of money in East Africa. First of all we need to understand the nature or the characteristics of money. Money is a universal medium which expresses the value of goods and commodities in the community. Money is universal in the sense that all goods can be valued through the same medium. Thus today we can say that so-and-so is worth so many shillings, thereby not only expressing the value which we place on so-and-so but also expressing its exchange value. Money is thus also an expression of the value for which we will exchange one good for another. Clearly therefore, money simplifies exchange as it provides a universal system against which all goods can be valued. Today in East Africa all goods are valued in terms of shillings so that the value of any one good can be compared with that of any other.
R. M. A. van Zwanenberg, Anne King
Conclusion
Abstract
Two outstanding political events have occurred in East Africa during the last one hundred years. The establishment of colonial rule was the first. The achievement of independence of the East African states was the second. Can we estimate the economic significance of these two events for the peoples of Kenya and Uganda?
R. M. A. van Zwanenberg, Anne King
Backmatter
Metadaten
Titel
An Economic History of Kenya and Uganda 1800–1970
verfasst von
R. M. A. van Zwanenberg
Anne King
Copyright-Jahr
1975
Verlag
Palgrave Macmillan UK
Electronic ISBN
978-1-349-02442-1
Print ISBN
978-1-349-02444-5
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-02442-1