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War and Economic Development: Settlers in Kenya, 1914–1918

The First World War is perhaps the least studied period in the historiography of European settlement in Kenya. This paper reverses the previously held view of settler economic decline and disarray. Despite apparent problems of shipping shortages, closure of markets and loss of white manpower, settler products were grown and exported in ever-increasing quantities during the war years. The grain and livestock industries were stimulated by new wartime markets whilst plantation crops, chiefly sisal and coffee, continued the impetus of pre-war activity and substantial new planting took place. Prosperity and development, not reversal and decline, were the keynotes of the settler wartime economy. With this new evidence and understanding, it is possible to re-interpret much of the early history of colonial Kenya. The fundamental vulnerability and stuttering growth of white settlement before 1914 gave way to the gradual assertion of the settler economy over the African, with state support, during and after the war. But this assertion and growth was founded upon abnormal economic circumstances: on cheap and available labour, insatiable markets and a pre-occupied colonial state. The post-war crises of labour and market contraction, and the pre-eminence of the settler sector after 1920, therefore must be traced to this accelerated and artificial growth in the settler economy in 1914–18.