I became interested in Africa while studying Politics and Economics in Sheffield, and in 1968 I went to St Antony's College, Oxford to study for a doctorate on African Politics. I spent fourteen months in a peasant village in Tanzania doing fieldwork for my doctorate, and then returned to East Africa in 1973 to follow-up the Tanzanian fieldwork with research on Kenyan peasant farmers. In many respects this was the most formative period of my life. It was my first in-depth contact with a culture other than my own, it gave me an insight into the lives and struggles of some of the world's poorest people, and it was my first experience of learning and mastering a foreign language (Swahili) and living in that language.   The major academic result of it all was a very large, prize-winning book on the economic history of Kenya in the colonial period - a book that took me ten years to research and write.

Class and Economic Change in Kenya (1980) established my academic reputation, and most people associate me with it and my subsequent work in the field of development. My short follow-up book, Development and Underdevelopment in Historical Perspective (1983), is probably my most well-known, and certainly my best-selling, piece of academic work - and it had a sequel, eighteen years later, in Seeking Social Justice through Globalization (2001) which has also generated considerable interest.

But while I continued to write and research on Third World development issues, I gradually became deeply disillusioned and distressed by what was going on in Africa itself. To put it simply, I thought that the people among whom I had lived in the 1970s, and whose intelligence and perseverance in adversity I had come to admire greatly, were being grossly betrayed and abused by their supposed political leaders and governors. I therefore gave up researching and writing on the continent from the early 1980s. There was however one last, and unexpected, development on this "African' side of my intellectual biography. Having been persuaded, rather against my will, to attend a conference of the Australasian African Studies Association in Adelaide, Australia in 2000, I felt the only honest paper I could contribute was one entitled: 'Why I gave up African Studies'. (Available at, http://motspluriels.arts.uwa.edu.au/MP1600gk.html). It caused a minor uproar at the Conference and, having been circulated world-wide on web notice boards and other sites, has generated quite a polemic since (see http://www.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v7/v7i2a17.htm for some of that polemic and my reply to critics.)