The story of our mangrove cutters and the regional economy that sustained them suggests that this interpretation may be partly wrong. Certainly the colonial state in the Kenya highlands was "strong" and interventionist. The farming and herding peoples its settlers came to dominate were only on the fringes of regional systems of exchange and hence more vulnerable than their economically more sophisticated counterparts in West Africa. But the Swahill coast is a different story. Here there was a 1,000-year-old tradition of long-distance sea trade. This tradition survived, albeit with modification, into the colonial era, and allowed coastal people to challenge the primacy of the colonial economy. The survival of the regional economy ensured that if the colonial state was "strong" on the coast, it was less strong there than it was in the interior. Coastal people, even every poor ones, had economic options outside the colonial economy, something that became less possible in the interior as people's options narrowed to subsistence farming or wage labor in the colonial economy.

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labor migration Africa regional trade maritime trade economic history (East) colonialism