Based on over two hundred and fifty psychiatric case files, this book offers a radical new departure from existing historical accounts of what is still commonly thought of as the most picturesque of Britain's colonies overseas. By tracing the life histories of Kenya's 'white insane', the book allows for a new account of settler society: one that moves attention away from the 'great white hunters' and heroic pioneer farmers to all those Europeans who did not manage to emulate the colonial ideal. In doing so, it raises important new questions around deviance, transgression and social control. Sitting at the intersection of a number of fields, the book will appeal to students and teachers of imperial history, colonial medicine, African history and postcolonial theory and will prove a valuable addition to both undergraduate and postgraduate courses.

Reviews

With this insightful and sensitive analysis of Europeans incarcerated for mental illness in colonial Kenya, Will Jackson manages not only to reclaim these troubled, marginalized individuals as historically meaningful actors. He also casts a fresh and revealing light on the settler community as a whole. The result is a strikingly original and important contribution to the scholarship on settler colonialism.'
Dane Kennedy, Elmer Louis Kayser Professor of History and International Affairs, George Washington University

'The self-disciplined effort to sustain imperial prestige did not inevitably send Kenya's white settlers mad - just as the constraints of subjection did not necessarily madden Africans. But ordinary human weaknesses - financial, social, or sexual - did seem especially dangerous to an anxious white minority. The documented confinement of their 'poor men and loose women' has enabled Jackson, in this carefully observed and beautifully written study, to portray Kenya's settlers in the round. Not all were libidinous aristocrats swapping wives in Happy Valley, nor all gentleman farmers pioneering under the flame trees of Thika.'
John Lonsdale, Emeritus Professor of Modern African History and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge

General Editor's introduction
Introduction
1. Approaching madness: deviant psychology in Kenya Colony
2. No ordinary chaps: class, gender and the licensing of transgression
3. The lives of Kenya's white insane
4. Battered wives and broken homes: the colonial family
5. Stigma, shame and scandal: sex and mental illness
6. States of emergency: psychosis and transgression
Conclusion
Appendices
Bibliography
Index