Eroding the Commons

• Development, environment & colonial history - Baringo in the nineteenth century, c. 1840-1900 - Lines on a map: moving frontiers c. 1900-20 - Kiplel kowo, 'the white bones': drought & depression 1917-39 - The Baringo range war 1918-48 - Grazing, goats & responsible government: the Kenya Land Commission 1932-4 - Reconditioning the range: the emerging politics of ecology 1930-40s - The politics of property: African land development in Baringo 1948-63 - The captured forest: Lembus 1904-63 - Watering the shamba: the Perkerra irrigation scheme, 1952-63 - Colonial development in lowland Baringo: misreading history - Appendix, the Baringo historical texts - Bibliography

...an exceptional study... one of a handful of such studies that have important things to say to wider non-specialist audiences: to historians of empire interested in the commonalities of a world-wide imperial project; and to those in the development community who accept that, if rural development is to have a future, its past must be fully acknowledged and understood...Eroding the Commons challenges historians' as well as developers' narratives by confronting us with complexity. Officials and settlers were mostly reluctant oppressors and the Tuken were not the inept pastoralists that the narrative insisted that they must be. There were and are no easy answers to development, in Baringo or elsewhere, but there is now a clear, informed and thoughtful account of its history.