Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora/Birth Control in the Decolonizing Caribbean: Reproductive Politics and Practice on Four Islands, 1930–1970/A Problem of Great Importance: Population, Race, and Power in the British Empire, 1918–1973/Unreasonable Histories: Nativism, Multiracial Lives, and the Genealogical Imagination in British Africa

Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora. By sana aiyar. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. 384 pp. $51.50 (hardcover).

Birth Control in the Decolonizing Caribbean: Reproductive Politics and Practice on Four Islands, 1930-1970. By nicole c. BOURBONNAIS. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 272 pp. $99.99 (hardcover).

A Problem of Great Importance: Population, Race, and Power in the British Empire, 1918-1973. By KARL ITTMANN. Oakland: University of California Press, 2013. 310 pp. $39.95 (paper).

Unreasonable Histories: Nativism, Multiracial Lives, and the Genealogical Imagination in British Africa. By Christopher J. LEE. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. 368 pp. $94.95 (cloth).

Race and the Politics of Decolonization

In 1956, amid debates regarding Kenya's independence, K. D. Travadi claimed: "I, myself am in my 44th year in this country have had my children and my children's children born here in this country and I call myself an African and particularly a Kenyan first and a Kenyan last" (Aiyar, p. 234). Travadi, a Nairobi lawyer and Kenya India Congress member, was born in India, but spent his professional career in Kenya and was invested for political and familial reasons in Kenya's future. And yet neither the colonial government of Kenya nor many "native" Kenyans accepted Travadi's claim that an "Indian" could be "African." In 1967, four years after independence, the state passed Africanization legislation, which restricted the mobility and economic activity of Indians, and led to the emigration of 33,000 people, for whom belonging in the nation no longer seemed possible.

Travadi's statement reveals how the tension between racial and territorial belonging shaped the politics of decolonization. The theorization of human difference has a long history, but in the era of modern empires, difference took on new salience through efforts to define, categorize, and enumerate populations in service of colonial rule.1 While historians have studied race at the level of colonial discourse, four new histories illuminate how contestations on the grounds of race shaped the trajectory of decolonization in the British Empire. In the twentieth century, racial politics fueled a new science of demography, which made visible the differential fertility rate between populations in Europe and the colonized world. Racial politics informed debates surrounding birth control and limited the possibilities for women to exercise autonomy over their...