Some recent East African peasant studies

Abstract

Torben Bager, Marketing Cooperatives and Peasants in Kenya Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, Uppsala, 1980, pp. 116. No price. John Carlsen, Economic and Social transformation in Rural Kenya Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, Uppsala, 1980, pp. 230. No price. Frederick Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labour and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890–1925, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1980, pp. 328, £15.75. The author discusses three recent books on agrarian Kenya: Marketing Cooperatives and Peasants in Kenya by Torben Bager, Economic and Social Transformation in Rural Kenya by John Carlsen, and From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labour and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya 1880–1925 by Frederick Cooper. It is argued that the data presented in these books confirm that a middle peasantry preponderates in areas outside the White Highlands, although one of the authors, Carlsen, asserts the contrary. Some fundamental methodological issues with respect to th...