David Paul Wirtz (2024)

My doctoral research investigates the enduring historical legacies of settler colonialism linked to the tea industry in Kenya’s “White Highlands”. I aim to analyse how persistent structures of inequality were fashioned during the colonial encounter. Using a bottom-up ethnographic approach rooted in the tea plantations, I intend to conduct a study of the history and political economy of tea in Kenya. Drawing on archival records and ethnographic fieldwork, I plan to explore the ways in which colonialism and its afterlives appear in tea plantation labourers’ and planters’ accounts of their everyday struggles and experiences.

At the heart of this project lies the question of how tea growing shapes the physical and social landscape of the “White Highlands” to this day. I aim to contribute to overarching debates on the workings of racialised capitalism, the colonial extraction of labour, and their persistent afterlife, continuity, and change. My doctoral studies are generously supported by the ESRC Cam-DTP studentship and the Cambridge Trust, where I am an Honorary Cambridge Trust International Scholar.

I studied political science and public law in Germany and France, and completed my master’s degree in social anthropology at the University of Oxford. Prior to my PhD, I worked for the United Nations in Nairobi, where I researched the role of voluntary labour in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).