Early 20th Century: (Pax Colonia — Three Broad Economic Models of Indigenous Cash-Crop, Settler Cash-Crop, and Industrial-Urban Mining Economies, the Uganda …

Early 20th Century: (Pax Colonia — Three Broad Economic Models of Indigenous Cash-Crop, Settler Cash-Crop, and Industrial-Urban Mining Economies, the Uganda Railway as a Conquest of the Environment Built 1896–1901 from Mombasa to Kisumu, Lugard’s Dual Mandate Declaring That the Products of the Tropics Were Vital to British Industrial Life and Its Markets for Manufactures): Core colonial objectives included rendering territories both militarily stable and economically viable. Three broad economic models developed: the indigenous cash-crop economy in the hands of African peasant producers across tropical western, central, and eastern Africa; the settler cash-crop economy in territories like Kenya where production was in white settlers’ hands; and the industrial-urban economy that emerged from mining across southern and central Africa. The belief that African society would be naturally improved through exposure to European commerce was superseded by the notion that modernization required outside political intervention. Roads and railways were held to have opened up the African interior — the Uganda Railway, built between 1896 and 1901 from Mombasa to Kisumu on Lake Victoria, sliced across the coastal belt, rose into the Kenyan highlands, and linked the lacustrine interior to the Indian Ocean, representing a conquest of the environment that was unimaginable a generation earlier. Lugard’s Dual Mandate declared that the products of the tropics were vital to British industrial life and that responsibility for material advancement of Africa lay with Britain itself and the colonial administration that must follow pacification.