Introduction

Abstract

This Chapter introduces readers to Kenya and the three infrastructures whose histories I unfold over the course of the book, explaining why a focus on infrastructures gives us unique purchase on state-capital dynamics over the course of the long twentieth century. I argue that corporate-state entanglements are the outgrowth of durable policies of austerity, a political and economic form that has been the organizing logic of statecraft in Kenya since the early colonial period. These dynamics, I show, critically shaped both Kenya’s infrastructural landscape and the status of infrastructural work. Building out this argument, I introduce readers to the concepts of “infrastructural attachments” and “prosthetic work.” I explain what I see as being the book’s main contributions to: African history, science and technology studies, histories of capitalism, and infrastructure studies.