Enterprising Africans: The expanding economy and institutional barriers in colonial Kenya

Building on the extensive literature on colonial rural capitalism, particularly characteristic of Western Africa, this paper examines African small-scale entrepreneurship within a more diversified yet simultaneously more discriminative economy of Kenya. It contributes to the relatively scarce literature on historical African entrepreneurship by investigating different forms of formal sector entrepreneurial activities and reveals how colonial institutional constraints on some activities and the encouragement of others guided the economic activities of entrepreneurs. Despite relatively few African licensed traders and companies, it finds no evidence of a lack of African entrepreneurship, as many small-scale operations were viable in the informal sector. The changing regulatory framework of the colony also enabled the setting up of cooperative enterprises from the late 1940s. This resulted in the proliferation of cooperative societies, which have received less attention in the literature on entrepreneurship.