ABSTRACT
In 1896, the Imperial British East Africa Company initiated the construction of a railway from Mombasa to Uganda. In Kenya, the railway was to be a strongly influential factor in triggering off subsequent white settlement on something like three million hectares of high-altitude land. With the development of large-scale agriculture in the White Highlands, there followed extensive investment in the infrastructure of communications and administration. Distant farming areas were connected by branch lines and interior nodes increased in size and importance. By the 1920s, the settler economy was linked to fairly sophisticated systems of transportation, communication and administration which also supported urban centres supplying the settler economy with commercial services. In 1929, effects of the world depression started being felt in Kenya. In the 1930s, there was also the ambition to divert African low-cost production on to export markets.
