Focusing on the first decades of the twentieth century but acknowledging longer-term patterns of circulation, this paper discusses how cattle, historically occupying important meanings and roles in the lives of African agropastoralists, was commodified and marketed in southern Mozambique just as Lourenço Marques became the new capital of Mozambique. Highlighting the relations that consolidated between the capital and surrounding cattle-rich areas in a period marked by cattle disease but also the First World War and the Great Depression, the paper looks at the role of different agents and bodies involved in the emerging beef market. Ultimately, the paper shows how African agropastoralists, the main cattle producers in the region, resisted these conditions and tried to engage with markets on their own terms, even in the face of their dwindling control over the different factors that influenced the size and quality of their herds.

This article examines the racial politics of decolonization in late-colonial Nairobi in the decade before independence through the unique space of the colonial bus using archival letters from a group of European women who called themselves ‘The Housewives’. In letters to Nairobi's mayor and the Kenya Bus Service (KBS), the Housewives argued against a newly proposed transportation policy that would make all seating on the colonial buses the same price, doing away with the first-class section. The letters reveal that African bus riders, particularly Muslim women riders, were centrally important in this crucial time in Kenya's urban history. With Nairobi still under a ‘State of Emergency’ as military operations against the Land and Freedom Army (Mau Mau) were coming to an end, these letters show colonial buses as battlegrounds during the final years of British colonial rule in Kenya with extremely porous social borders and transportation vehicles serving as rich sites of urban life.

This paper examines African peasant tobacco production in Southern Rhodesia from 1900 to 1980, from the cusp of colonialism to its end. It analyses shifting state policy towards African tobacco producers, the concomitant impact on peasant economies, accumulation patterns and the rural physical landscape and peasant responses. It focuses on the changing agricultural commodity value chains, cash crop asymmetries, and global market forces to explain colonial responses to peasant production and peasant agency. We argue that the symbolic value of each agricultural commodity, in entrenching the hierarchy of power relations and the institutionalisation of white control, mediated colonial responses to peasant production and concomitantly ‘peasant agency’. We use this case study to highlight the structural constraints on ‘agency’ and to explore how cash crop asymmetries helped structure agrarian encounters and power relations in colonial Africa. The paper uses archival sources from the National Archives of Zimbabwe, newspapers, and journals from the Tobacco Research Board (TRB).

This article examines the means by which perceived threats of sleeping sickness epidemics were used to justify extensive population resettlement through the formation of ‘concentrations’ in Ulanga District, Tanganyika, between 1939 and 1945. Underlying this specious spatial reordering of communities were ulterior motives that interpreted and pushed broader colonial development agendas of social engineering. The prominent role of leading colonial officers, notably A. T. Culwick, is emphasised and reexamined, especially in relationship to paternalism and the coercive aspects of closer settlement. This article explores the nature of legitimised coercion, contested meanings of the League of Nations mandate, and tensions within the administration. Local resistance to concentration challenged colonial hegemony and the self-fashioned form of benign autocracy constructed by officials like Culwick, who relied on a projection of prestige for political authority in his district and among his peers. Concentration was therefore a contested and contingent process with dissent evidenced both against and within government.

Addressing a question of how states in both Asia and the world have resolved the dilemma posed by ecologically recalcitrant “nonstate spaces,” this essay examines a refuge in Taiwan's Northern Mountains. Resistance to Japanese rule from 1896, sheltered in the Grass Mountain uplands, precipitated not just colonial pacification, but a platform of “modern” (Western-modeled, but Meiji Japanese and Qing Chinese influenced) transformation. This was promoted through the educational and symbolic cultivation of Zhishan Rock, a press discourse of nature for public edification, as well as policies that strengthened policing, guided resettlement, and opened the area to recreation. Such tailored “stating” processes altered the image of the region, infused a culture of ecological veneration, and established a more sustainable system of oversight. A critical phase to Grass Mountain becoming a national park, these changes presented a template for Japanese (as subsequent) authorities as they struggled to manage Taiwan's unruly highland frontiers.

During Africa’s anti-colonial movements, women in French colonies were less politically active than women in British colonies. Hern examines how differences in British and French education policies in the Gold Coast and Senegal between the 1920s and the 1950s shaped women’s opportunities for participating in nationalist activity and becoming involved in early-independence politics. Compared to girls’ education in Senegal, girls’ education in the Gold Coast was more widespread, came from a variety of providers, and was less focused on domesticity. Women in the Gold Coast were thus more likely to be mobilized as political agents during the nationalist movement and integrated into Ghana’s new independent government.

Migration was a crucial component of the spatially uneven formation of labour markets and export-oriented economies in colonial Africa. Much of this mobility was initiated by migrants themselves rather than by colonial authorities. Building on analytical concepts from economic history and migration theory, this study explains the changing composition and magnitude of one such uncontrolled migration flow, from Ruanda-Urundi to Buganda. Migrants’ mobility choices – when to migrate, for how long, and with whom – proved highly responsive to shifting economic opportunity structures on the sending and receiving ends. Initially, large differences in terms of land and labour endowments, socio-economic structures, and colonial interventions, combined with substantial scope for price arbitrage, created large spatial inequalities of opportunity and strong incentives for circular male labour migration. Over time, however, migration contracted as opportunities in Ruanda-Urundi and Uganda converged, not in the least as a result of large-scale mobility itself.

Although John W. Colenso thought that he was merely acting as amicus curiae — a friend of the court — in compiling evidence to explain Langalibalele's supposed rebellion in 1873, the Bishop of Natal ended up writing a damning anti-colonial tract. This paper will attempt to show how this report — written for the Queen and Colenso's House of Lord peers — is not just an achievement in legal refutation and forensic analysis but that it was a linguistic and cultural statement about the working and limits of Zulu law as Colenso understood it through his interactions with his Natal converts. Although it is obvious that Colenso's audience was not moved by his supplications on Langalibelele's behalf, it is less obvious why those who thought of Colenso as a maverick and heretic should have ignored his thorough repudiation of cultural chauvinism. The paper will suggest that Colenso's Remarks were ignored precisely because to take them seriously would have meant abandoning the authoritarian underpinnings of the late 19th century colonial project.

This article explores colonial development policy on the margins of British East Africa. It argues that much like current development practice in the region, increased colonial interventionism in the years after 1940 was motivated by security interests as well as environmental and economic considerations. Rural interventions were used as a mechanism to ‘rein in’ what were perceived to be subversive populations, as well as contain potential security threats. The article therefore throws new light on the nature of colonial rural development, as well as the connections between past and present development practice.

In October 1934, a group of schoolgirls at Malangali School in Iringa Province, Tanganyika received doses of what the school headmistress thought was shark liver oil. Many girls began to spit and vomit the medicine, while others attempted to leave the school grounds to return home. Within three hours, several pupils had died and within three days, another 32 girls succumbed to the toxic draught. This article examines this little known and poorly understood tragedy through the lens of the scientific and social experimentation that occurred at Malangali School. As one of two government- run schools that enrolled girls, Malangali provided the colonial state with an opportunity to conduct a variety of experiments upon a captive audience. This article argues that the ‘discovery of colonial malnutrition’ in the interwar period not only depoliticized hunger but its emphasis on techno-chemical approaches to social and material problems led to tragedy.

Postwar politics in British-occupied Somalia is usually reduced to the activities of the Somali Youth League, the foremost anticolonial nationalist movement. However, by 1947, smaller associations, pejoratively nicknamed the pro-Italia, came together in an effort to return Somalia to Italy under international mandate. Drawing upon new archival sources, the article argues that this movement did not stem from arguments supporting colonial rule, but rather from objections to the nationalist agenda and military occupation. Closer attention to these voices sheds light on the deeper meanings of political alignment during the change of regime and enhances our understanding of political developments in postwar Somalia.