Kenya’s central highlands are the elevated portions of East Africa that European colonists entered from the beginning of the twentieth century to make Kenya a white settlement area. This book analyzes the colonization of the Kamba, Kikuyu, and Maasai who live there. Robert Tignor focuses on changes in education, wage laboring, involvement in the monetized market system, and anticolonial nationalism from about 1900 to 1939.

Although the Kamba, Kikuyu, and Maasai all came under the influence of British administrators, settlers, and missionaries, the Kikuyu became most deeply involved in the colonial economy and polity of Kenya, taking the lead in activities spurned by the Kamba and Maasai. Examining the colonial records of all three peoples, Tignor compares these responses to European colonialism and advances our understanding of the nature of change under colonial rule.

Originally published in 1976.

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