Meanwhile, in 1901 the completion of the Uganda Railway from the coast at Mombasa to the Lake Victoria port of Kisumu moved colonial authorities to encourage the growth of cash crops to help pay the railway’s operating costs.

Another result of the railway construction was the 1902 decision to transfer the eastern section of the Uganda Protectorate to the Kenya Colony, then called the East Africa Protectorate, to keep the entire line under one local colonial administration.

Because the railway experienced cost overruns in Kenya, the British decided to justify its exceptional expense and pay its operating costs by introducing large-scale European settlement in a vast tract of land that became a centre of cash-crop agriculture known as the “White Highlands”.

A major part of the territory, eventually left off of the “East Africa Protectorate” was the Uganda Scheme, in which the British Empire offered to create a Jewish nation-state.

The offer was made to the Zionist movement which rejected it, refusing to accept anything other than the ancient Land of Israel.