In the sister two volumes entitled Unhappy Valley 1 and Unhappy Valley 2, the authors investigate major themes including the conquest origins and subsequent development of the colonial state, the contradictory social forces that articulated African societies to European capitalism, and the creation of new political communities and changing meanings of ethnicity in Africa, in the context of social differentiation and class formation. There is substantial new work on the problems of Mau Mau and of wealth, poverty and civic virtue in Kikuyu political thought. The authors make a fresh contribution to a deeper historical understanding of contemporary Kenyan society and, in particular, of the British and Kikuyu origins of Mau Mau and the emergency of the 1950s. They also highlight some of the shortcomings of ideas about development, explore the limitations of narrowly structuralist Marxist theory of the state, and reflect on the role of history in the future of Africa.