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.

Efforts to commercialize agriculture in peasant societies through investments in technology and various pricing strategies have failed to create the food surpluses needed to forestall famine and support industrialization in East Africa. Seavoy explores this problem, basing his study on the case of Tanzania, a country that experiences recurrent peacetime famines associated with failures in subsistence agriculture. Providing an analysis of East African subsistence culture, he investigates the failures of national agricultural policies and defines strategies for inducing subsistence farmers to shift to commercial production. Seavoy looks at various development initiatives involving technological inputs, political pressure, taxation, and land tenure provisions and their effects on the political economy of subsistence agriculture. He presents a detailed survey of subsistence culture, its agricultural and pastoral practices, and such variables as labor, topography, rainfall, and population density. The shaping of the East African political economy under colonial rule is discussed, together with the economic, social, and political legacy that has persisted to the present day. Seavoy examines Tanzanian agricultural policy, which has aimed at facilitating the transition to commercial agriculture. He finds that the country is a long way from achieving the assured food surpluses that would enable the nation to support an urban industrial workforce. Among the underlying causes he notes the continuing population explosion, the farmers' objections to commercialized agriculture, and deficiencies in the physical infrastructure, trained personnel, and political institutions. He argues that surpluses will not be created until political leaders use the power of national government to enforce the shift to commercial production. A noteworthy and original contribution to development literature, this work is relevant to studies in modern political economy, Third World development, agricultural economy, and related disciplines.

Historical review of underdevelopment, starvation and food shortages in Africa - shows how Western-controlled trade in forced labour destroyed self reliance; examines food production prior to colonialism, role of Europe in resources development and plantation-based monoculture, the evolution of nationalism, social stratification, agricultural exports, etc.; discusses the effects of post-independence development policies and the political aspects of food aid. References, statistical tables.

Based on archival research in Europe, Africa, and Asia, "Empire of Hunger: Famine and the French Colonial State, 1867-1945, " traces changing conceptions of famine in the French Empire. Though French administrators once dismissed famine as an act of god or a misfortune of nature, developments in nutrition science, social engineering, and notions of race and gender suggested new tools for managing food and bodies in the colonies. At the same time, an emerging sense of the French Empire as a participant in an international humanitarian project, largely centered around the League of Nations, profoundly altered ideas of what colonialism was supposed to accomplish. In the interwar period, the high modernist confidence in the ability to mitigate hunger, coupled with the acknowledgement of the political obligation to do so, marked a turning point in the French Empire's relationship to its subjects and to nature itself. Increasingly sophisticated understandings of famine saddled the French colonial state with commitments that they were unable and unwilling to fulfill, undermining the ideological justifications of empire. This study shows how modern liberal ethics and norms of governance emerged from a contested history of imperialism.

Abstract: The book provides a new account of African history and its development prospects. The author focuses on Africa's current food crisis, tracing its origins back to the colonial exploitation of the 19th century. Post-independence strategies are analyzed. The author argues that a profound revolution is under way in Africa's backwaters and urban slums where the poor are withdrawing from the formal market and developing highly innovative and informal networks of trade and production. Increased involveme nt in political struggles at community and national levels is described.

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.

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.

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.

History.