Race and empire: Eugenics in colonial Kenya

Race and empire tells the story of a short-lived but vehement eugenics movement that emerged among a group of Europeans in Kenya in the 1930s, unleashing a set of writings on racial differences in intelligence more extreme than that emanating from any other British colony in the twentieth century.

The Kenyan eugenics movement of the 1930s adapted British ideas to the colonial environment: in all its extremity, Kenyan eugenics was not simply a bizarre and embarrassing colonial mutation,…