Dr Dave Hyde

Dave Hyde is currently working on a book titled Labour, Development and Resistance in Kenya. This undertakes a sustained examination of the restructuring of Kenya's economy in response to the remaking of the global economy and British development policy after 1945.
The work devotes close attention to changes in working conditions and labour disputes, and their politicisation in the run up to independence and during the first decade of the post colony. The work deals with these issues in a variety of settings and case studies. Primary production [coffee, tea, sisal and pineapples], industrial production [oil and petroleum, and light industries], railways and local government are all brought into view.

His research in recent years has been developed in close collaboration with the British Academy sponsored commodity histories project, a joint research collaboration between the Wageningen University Agrarian Technology & Development Programme [Netherlands] and the Open University Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies.


The details of this project can be found at www.open.ac.uk/Arts/ferguson-centre/commodities-of-empire. This has brought forth several publications.

Continuous research themes and issues in Dave Hyde's published work are -

cash crops: primary commodities, commodity chains and global competition
plantation economies and plantation production
agricultural change : modernisation, rural restructuring,
land reform and dispossession
rural poverty
rural migration and urban growth
responses to change: labour conflicts
servicing agriculture:
transport infrastructure in a developing economy

Supervision of research students

Those undertaking Africa related research.

Past Teaching
TW 105
Society and Development
[module leader]
TW 209
Colonialism, Culture and Resistance
[module leader]
HR 115
Patterns of Global History: paths to globalisation
AI 1203
Political Economy of International Development

AI 1206
International Order
AI 2206
Sustainability and Development
AI 3001
International Development Short Dissertation [module Leader]
Present Teaching
AI 1202
Imperialism: economy, state and war
[module Leader]
AI 2203
Colonialism and Development
[module Leader]
AI 3000
International Development Dissertation: Africa Pathway

AI 3203
Food and Hunger
AI 2201
Development Theory and Practice
AI 1306
International Studies
AI 1201
Poverty, Inequality and International Development

International Development Programme.

Current activity

In recent years Dave Hyde has been closely associated with the Commodities of Empire Project. This is a British Academy sponsored joint research collaboration between the Wageningen University Agrarian Technology & Development Programme [Netherlands] and the Open University's Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies. The project's aims and objectives are summarised below.
The mutually reinforcing relationship between ‘commodities’ and ‘empires’ has long been recognised. Over the last six centuries the quest for profits has driven imperial expansion, with the global trade in commodities fuelling the ongoing industrial revolution. These ‘commodities of empire’, which became transnationally mobilised in ever larger quantities, included foodstuffs (wheat, rice, bananas); industrial crops (cotton, rubber, linseed and palm oils); stimulants (sugar, tea, coffee, cocoa, tobacco and opium); and ores
(tin, copper, gold, diamonds). Their expanded production and global movements brought vast spatial, social, economic and cultural changes to both metropoles and colonies.
In the Commodities of Empire project we explore the networks through which such commodities circulated within, and in the spaces between, empires. We are particularly attentive to local processes –
originating in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America – which significantly influenced the outcome of the encounter between the world economy and regional societies, doing so through a comparative approach that explores the experiences of peoples subjected to different imperial hegemonies.
Further details of the project can be found at
www.open.ac.uk/Arts/ferguson-centre/commodities-of-empire.

Conference papers

East African Railways and Harbours: a 'crisis of accumulation' 1945-63.
Subversions of Colonial Cultures: Commodities and Anti-Commodities in Global History
5th Annual International Workshop of the Commodities of Empire Project, Wageningen University Technology and Agricultural Development Programme, Wageningen [NL], September 2012.
Undercurrents to Independence: Plantation Struggles in Kenya's Central Province 1959-63. Local forms of production as resistance against global domination: anti-commodities, 4th Annual International Workshop of the Commodities of Empire Project, The International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, 17-19 June 2010.
Paying for the Emergency by Displacing the Settlers: Global Coffee and Rural Restructuring in Late Colonial Kenya. Power and Resistance within Commodity Chains, 1800-2000, 3rd Annual International Workshop of the Commodities of Empire Project,
Open University Camden Town, London, 29 June 2009.
Global Coffee and Decolonisation in Kenya: overproduction, quotas and rural restructuring. Commodity Histories: historical aspects of the global movement of commodities, 1st International Workshop of the Commodities of Empire Project, 13-14 July 2007, Open University, London Regional Centre, Camden Town.
The East African Railway Strike [1959-60].
'The Political Economy of Kenya – Past & Present' conference, St Antony’s College, Oxford, May 2004.
Upsurge in the Kericho Valley: Tea Plantation Strikes in Kenya, 1959-66.
Development Studies Association workshop [History and Development Group], SOAS., June 2003.
The World Coffee Crisis and its Impact on Kenya [1955-1961]. Development Studies Association workshop [History and Development Group], L.S.E., June 2002.
The Nairobi General Strike [1950]: From Protest to Insurgency;
'East Africa's Urban Pasts' conference, Nairobi, July 2001.
East African Railways and Harbours, 1950-9: A Crisis of Accumulation. Development Studies Association workshop [History and Development Group], Royal Holloway College, May 2001.
The Kenya Canners Strike [1960].
Continuity and Change in Colonial and Post-Colonial East Africa conference, S.O.A.S., June 2000.
Beyond Mau Mau: Plantation Unionism and the Independence Struggle in Kenya. 'Revisionist Histories of Mau Mau' conference, S.O.A.S., November 1999.
Plantation Strikes in Kenya's Thika and Kiambu Districts, 1960.
Development Studies Association workshop [History and Development Group], Royal Holloway College, June 1998.
Trade Unions and the State in Kenya, 1945-63.
Kenyatta University department of history seminar, Nairobi, Kenya, January 1997.

Editorships/panel committee memberships

Panel Convenor: African Labour Movements, African Studies Association Conference 2004.

Research Grants

PhD Studentship, Economic and Social Research Council 1996-9.
Henry Charles Chapman Fellowship, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, 2003-4