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This study explores the marketability of Isak Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales, published in the US in 1934. The term marketability is used to refer to the book as a potentially desirable object for sale on the market, successfully promoted by the Book-of-the-Month-Club whose members were intent on educating themselves and refining their taste. The set-up and marketing strategies of the Book-of-the-Month-Club are considered in relation to the role of advertising as a discourse teaching social and personal values in a developing consumer culture where identity and personality were represented as never-ending, imperative projects.  The consuming self is an individual freed from the restraints of tradition and communal values, making her free choice of whom to be on an increasingly diverse market, endlessly reinventing her identity. But this self is also a commodity on an increasingly complex and impersonal market where appearance is destiny. A historically contextualized reading of Seven Gothic Tales makes it possible to use the term marketability to refer to the work itself as a literary investigation of the conditions of identity-construction in a culture dominated by market-mediated relationships. In this reading, the Great Depression figures as a moment that reveals the degree to which consumerist ideology and logic had come to determine the possibilities of imagining being and identity, a condition that Seven Gothic Tales both reflects and resists. The effect of globalized transformation of production and consumption were felt in the two places that went into the making of Seven Gothic Tales: the US where it was first published and colonial Kenya where the author lived between 1914 and 1931 and where the book was begun. This study argues that the success of Seven Gothic Tales in the US depended on the way in which Blixen/Dinesen's experience of colonial Kenya was an experience of commercial modernity that reverberated with the experience of the American readers. Central to this argument is the ideal of feudalism as an explicit and decisive element in the creation of colonial Kenya. The aristocratic theme that permeates Seven Gothic Tales must be understood in relation to a colonial socioeconomic context that reinvented the feudal ideal as a marketable commodity at a time when social status and identity had become negotiable on a consumer market.

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This thesis examines the lives of Senior Chief Koinange wa Mbiyu and his eldest son, Peter Mbiyu Koinange. It joins with the growing rise of biographical work within African Studies. It challenges the historical understanding of late colonial rule in Kenya and the role of official myth in pre- and post-independence historical narratives. Koinange wa Mbiyu was the patriarch of one of the most respected, wealthy, and politically influential Kikuyu families of Kenya's colonial and post-colonial period. His eldest son, Peter Mbiyu, received a prestigious education abroad and returned to Kenya where he became a prominent leader for African independent education African political action. Koinange and Peter bear frequent mention in academic discussions of collaboration, discontent, nationalism, and militancy in Kenya's colonial era. This thesis challenges the widely held narrative that Koinange and Peter embraced militant politics opposing colonial rule during the 1940s. While fitting larger understandings of decolonisation, it is not an honest depiction of the Koinange's political actions. As a result, this thesis is intentionally a work of revisionist history that looks to the profound changes in the culture and nature of colinal rule during the 1940s, rather than a political shift in the Koinanges. In addition to challenging the prevalent understanding of Koinange and Peter's political action, this thesis raises a number of areas - gender, wealth, elite and family dynamics, to name a few - where the Koinange family history would further illuminate the historical understanding of the colonial era. This thesis is a dual biography, crafted as a work of narrative history. It challenges a breadth of current scholarship, utilizing the largest collection of pre-Mau Mau archival records to date. This thesis engages with a number of historiographical challenges related to biography, the individual, the family, and the challenges of oral history shaped in the crucible of cultural crisis.

This is a study of the creation and evolution of state forestry within colonial Kenya in social, economic, and political terms. Spanning Kenya’s entire colonial period, it offers a chronological account of how forestry came to Kenya and grew to the extent of controlling almost two million hectares of land in the country, approximately 20 per cent of the most fertile and most populated upland (above 1,500 metres) region of central Kenya . The position of forestry within a colonial state apparatus that paradoxically sought to both ‘protect’ Africans from modernisation while exploiting them to establish Kenya as a ‘white man’s country’ is underexplored in the country’s historiography. This thesis therefore clarifies this role through an examination of the relationship between the Forest Department and its African workers, Kenya’s white settlers, and the colonial government. In essence, how each of these was engaged in a pursuit for their own idealised ‘good forest’. Kenya was the site of a strong conservationist argument for the establishment of forestry that typecast the country’s indigenous population as rapidly destroying the forests. This argument was bolstered against critics of the financial extravagance of forestry by the need to maintain and develop the forests of Kenya for the express purpose of supporting the Uganda railway. It was this argument that led the colony’s Forest Department along a path through the contradictions of colonial rule. The European settlers of Kenya are shown as being more than just a mere thorn in the side of the Forest Department, as their political power represented a very real threat to the department’s hegemony over the forests. Moreover, Kenya’s Forest Department deeply mistrusted private enterprise and constantly sought to control and limit the unsustainable exploitation of the forests. The department was seriously underfunded and understaffed until the second colonial occupation of the 1950s, a situation that resulted in a general ad hoc approach to forest policy. The department espoused the rhetoric of sustainable exploitation, but had no way of knowing whether the felling it authorised was actually sustainable, which was reflected in the underdevelopment of the sawmilling industry in Kenya. The agroforestry system, shamba, (previously unexplored in Kenya’s colonial historiography) is shown as being at the heart of forestry in Kenya and extremely significant as perhaps the most successful deployment of agroforestry by the British in colonial Africa. Shamba provided numerous opportunities to farm and receive education to landless Kikuyu in the colony, but also displayed very strong paternalistic aspects of control, with consequential African protest, as the Forest Department sought to create for itself a loyal and permanent forest workforce. Shamba was the keystone of forestry development in the 1950s, and its expansion cemented the position of forestry in Kenya as a top-down, state-centric agent of economic and social development.