By 1901, a mere dozen years after the first intrusion by British imperialist agents, the foundations of the new, colonial polity of Uganda had thus been largely laid. The defining essentials of its fortuitously determined territorial dimensions had now been fixed. The heavy-handed and often totally arbitrary rejigging of the boundaries of the kingdom areas at its core, and the forced amalgamation of thirty and more previously relatively autonomous rulerships into a mere five had now been accomplished. In three of them, thanks to British intervention, the entrenchment of what had initially been highly problematic oligarchical revolutions appeared assured, while the relatively distinctive arrangements for colonial government which had eventually emerged in Buganda were taking on the form of a model which was being steadily replicated elsewhere.

The extensive countrywide acquiescence in these major innovations constituted one measure of the fact that British colonial hegemony was now well established. The varying dependence following the death or deposition of every significant immediately preceding pre-colonial ruler of the four remaining acknowledged monarchs upon the favour of the British for the security of their tenure provided a second, while the reorganisation, upon peacetime lines, of the mercenary troops the British employed – now redesignated as the 4th and 5th battalions of the King's African Rifles, the former 1,000 strong, composed of a variety of local recruits superseding numbers of Sudanese, the latter of 500 Indian troops – constituted a third.