Policing the 'Reserve' Wage: the spatial control of unemployment, carceral labor discipline, and colonial profitability in Depression-Era Kenya

This Seminar is part of the Economics Seminar, Series Spring 2025.

Colonial police arrested tens of thousands of Kenyans in the 1930s for minor offenses—a dramatic increase from the 1920s—as the state sought to stabilize profitability for European capital. For the first time in a colony of perennial labor shortages, the Great Depression brought persistent unemployment. This pushed down wages and buttressed capital's flailing profitability. 

Yet unemployed young African men threatened Kenya's white society, from fears of petty crime and political organizing to delegitimizing imperial propaganda's central claim of "industrious uplift." Seeking to insulate white society from its threats, the state spatially controlled unemployment through arrest of these men in the White Highlands—usually on thin premises—followed by their repatriation to the Native Reserves. To simultaneously preserve the benefits of unemployment to colonial capital, the emergent apparatus kept the unemployed attached to the labor force through labor recruiting, carceral throughput, and fallback position calibration. 

Thus, low wages and recovering international demand meant that colonial capitalists claimed an increasing share of a growing product. State intervention in Kenya buoyed colonial capitalism through the Depression by further squeezing, harassing, and immiserating workers. This contrast with Depression-era intervention in capitalist core countries frames a distinct reading of the Keynesian turn from the disarticulated colonial periphery.

Speaker

• Jonathan Jenner (University of Manitoba)

Header image credit: Wambui via Unsplash.