This study focuses on the organisation, and transformation of agriculture among the Kipsigis of Western Kenya in the period preceding and during colonialism. Data was collected from both primary and secondary sources and subjected to corroborative analysis using the historical method. An eclectic approach borrowing certain paradigms from the underdevelopment and dependency and articulation of modes of production theories were employed as the major tools of analysis. From the beginning it is demonstrated that the pre-colonial agriculture in the Kipsigisland was dynamic, innovative, diverse, efficient, self-reliant and suited to the needs of the Kipsigis people. It is argued that the Kipsigis agricultural organisation was sound and rational and based on the people's knowledge of their environment.
The colonial penetration set a chain of events in motion which systematically modified, marginalised and subordinated the Kipsigis indigenous agriculture. Animal husbandry fell prey to the colonial manouvrers of depleting the Kipsigis stock. The Kipsigis farmers were peasantised and their role as commodity producers was articulated and firmly enforced. Part of the Kipsigis labour was proletarianised as migrant and resident workers in settler farms, and later as a semi-proletariat in the Kipsigisland. The Kipsigis local industry was marginalised by the incoming merchant capital and as more and more Kipsigisland was alienated for European settler farming activities, the Kipsigis indigenous land tenure systems was gradually changed and tended to forms of privatization. However, it is argued, indigenous agricultural organization did not disappear; it kept readjusting, was articulated and co-existed with the colonial capitalist sector in a contradictory manner of "destruction/preservation" or"conservation/dissolution". It emerges more clearly from the study that although agricultural land, animal husbandry, labour, and trade policies were aimed at achieving maximum benefits for the white settlers and the colonial state, the Kipsigis seem to have reacted in their own ways to exploit such policies for their own economic advantages. The Kipsigis were definitely not passive to the new colonial agricultural policies - they perceived them correctly accepting those that were of benefit to them while rejecting the undesirable ones, even if for a while as was the case of maize.

The agricultural changes in the Kipsigis land, C.1894-1963: an historical inquiry

Leadership failure, state collapse and external intervention : investigating instability and conflict in the democratic Republic of Congo, 1960-2010.

Theories of development - of the development of the capitalist mode of production-were implicit, essential elements of the classicist's study of political economy. They were the focus of analysis in the works of Karl Marx.

O. Sunkel

Papers

The internationalization of capital and labour