This book argues that a section of British policy makers, intellectuals and local settlers long considered constitutional federation the default medium of maintaining political control in Southern Africa, that frontier stretching from Southern Rhodesia through Central Africa to Kenya and greater East Africa.

British Federalism in Southern Africa is an intervention seeking to reduce the gap occasioned by the neglect of ideological and ideational aspects in the study of federalism in British Africa. To identify the range of ideas and ideological strands implicated, the author undertakes a long-range examination of federal thought in the interwar years and the postwar moment, focusing on federal claims in the settler colonies of Kenya and Southern Rhodesia. Taking a genealogical approach that looks beyond a handful of temporal demarcations during decolonization, Dan Juma recovers the range of negative critiques of imperial organization and colonial statecraft mounted by the British themselves, and illuminates constructive federal imaginings and counter-projects they propagated as alternative political organizations.