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Robert Maxon, Ph.D.

PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF HISTORY

Teaching Fields

  • African history
  • East African history
  • World history

Degrees

  • Ph.D., Syracuse University

Research Interests

Modern East Africa; colonial Kenya; economic history of Kenya; rural agrarian change in Kenya; colonial history of the Gusii of western Kenya; Kenyan constitutional history.

Graduate Students Advised

Ph.D.: Michael Hogan, Muoki Mbunga.

M.A.: Ian Ferguson.

Publications

Majimbo in Kenya’s Past: Federalism in the 1940s and 1950s (Cambria Press, 2017)

Kenya’s Independence Constitution: Constitution-Making and the End of Empire (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011)

Britain and Kenya’s Constitutions, 1950-1960 (Cambria Press, 2011)

East Africa: An Introductory History, 3rd and Revised Edition (West Virginia University Press, 2009)

Historical Dictionary of Kenya Third Edition, co-authored with Thomas Ofcansky (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014)

“Up in Smoke: Peasants, Capital and the Colonial State in the Tobacco Industry in Western Kenya, 1930-1939,”  African Economic History 22 (1994): 111-39

Struggle for Kenya: The Loss and Reassertion of Imperial Initiative, 1912-1923 (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993)

Co-editor with W.R. Ochieng,  An Economic History of Kenya (East African Educational Publishers, 1992)

Conflict and Accommodation in Western Kenya: the Gusii and the British, 1907-1963 (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989)

See also Dr. Maxon’s profile at the  Regional Research Institute.