Penality, violence and colonial rule in Kenya (c.1930-1952)

Within the research field of colonial violence, scholars focused on wars of conquest or independence and tended to picture counterinsurgency campaigns as an exceptional deployment of state violence in the face of peculiar threats. In colonial Kenya, the British repression of the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s has been the object of extensive and thorough analysis, contrasting with the lack of research on colonial punishment during the preceding decades. Yet the unleashing of state violence during the 1950s actually has a much longer history, lurking in the shadows of the criminal justice system that British powers introduced in the colony in the late nineteenth century. In contrast to previous scholarship, this study shows how ordinary colonial violence—although massively scaled up during the 1950s—was progressively normalised, institutionalised and intensified throughout the colonial experience of the 1930s and 1940s, laying the ground for the deployment of a counterinsurgency campaign against Mau Mau fighters.