In 1945 East Africa was under British rule. Many pressures exerted in the inter-war years had prevented it from passing irrevocably under the control of its small European population. But there were still a few who looked to Kenya's future as a ‘white man's country’; and European unofficials exercised a large influence over its neighbours too. Within less than twenty years there was revolutionary political change. By 1963 independence had come to all four of the territories of East Africa, Tanganyika, Uganda, Kenya and Zanzibar, as part of the vast process in which dependencies of Europe have emerged as the Third World. It is difficult to discern an equivalent revolution in their economy and society. Their tripartite caste structure was as yet little modified by the upward mobility of Africans in the political and administrative fields. Europeans still controlled large-scale production; Asians still serviced industry and agriculture by craftsmanship and trade; most Africans remained peasant farmers. Nor are the processes of change within African society itself easily susceptible of theoretical analysis. A nationalist historiography, for instance, must confront the lack of territorially organized national movements prior to the decades covered here. In sharp contrast to other parts of the Third World, there was no significant span of time during which nationalist groups and their ideologies might have affected the patterns of mobility or the boundaries of community. The nationalist impetus had to depend, instead, upon the successful meshing by tiny literate minorities – rarely possessed of independent means or professional status – of their own aspirations with the groundswell of discontents among the rural and urban populations.