African Merchants of the Indian Ocean
African Merchants of the Indian Ocean

Author: John Middleton

Publisher: Waveland Press

Published: 2003-11-07

Total Pages: 151

ISBN-13: 1478609680

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This new monograph serves as an authoritative introduction to an unusual people of eastern Africa known as Swahili. Middleton, who has known these people for a half a century, describes their highly stratified, merchant society and civilization, documenting their importance both for anthropologists and for others interested in Africa. Swahili continue today their centuries-old role as merchants in long-distance international trade, a role that has led them to form a society very distinct from any other in Africa. Middletons brief, personal treatment discusses Swahili recorded history as an integral part of their rich tradition and civilization. He clears up past confusions and mistaken assumptions without trying to define a single Swahili identity. His lucid approach unravels contradictions about Swahili being merchants and yet fishermen, who live in both cities as well as small villages, and who reckon various kinds of kinship and marriage. Swahili are often considered by non-Swahili as being both Africans and Arabs, but Middleton shows that they remain African despite having long adopted Islam and many aspects of Arab and Asian cultures.

East Africa and the Indian Ocean
East Africa and the Indian Ocean

Author: Edward A. Alpers

Publisher:

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13:

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"For centuries, East Africa has played a central role within the Indian Ocean world. The Arabs built the first trade networks there; these were laid siege to by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, followed by British colonialists in the nineteenth century. An interregional trade linked different subregions of East Africa to other Indian Ocean economies. For example, Hindu merchants from Gujarat played a leading role in the ivory trade of East Africa during the past four centuries. In the nineteenth century, Zanzibar became a major center of the Asian slave trade. While slave trading, slave raiding, and their consequences provide one thematic focus of this book, the author also demonstrates that Indian Ocean commercial networks were much more complex in the range of products exchanged, including luxury goods and staple food items, as well as enforced labor. Islam provided yet another connective tissue linking East Africa to the Indian Ocean world and served as a cultural matrix through which popular beliefs and practices were transmitted. This book offers an eye-opening perspective on an often neglected area of world history."--Publisher's description.

Africa and the Indian Ocean World from Early Times to Circa 1900
Africa and the Indian Ocean World from Early Times to Circa 1900

Author: Gwyn Campbell

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-07-18

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1108578624

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The history of Africa's historical relationship with the rest of the Indian Ocean world is one of a vibrant exchange that included commodities, people, flora and fauna, ideas, technologies and disease. This connection with the rest of the Indian Ocean world, a macro-region running from Eastern Africa, through the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia to East Asia, was also one heavily influenced by environmental factors. In presenting this rich and varied history, Gwyn Campbell argues that human-environment interaction, more than great men, state formation, or imperial expansion, was the central dynamic in the history of the Indian Ocean world (IOW). Environmental factors, notably the monsoon system of winds and currents, helped lay the basis for the emergence of a sophisticated and durable IOW 'global economy' around 1,500 years before the so-called European 'Voyages of Discovery'. Through his focus on human-environment interaction as the dynamic factor underpinning historical developments, Campbell radically challenges Eurocentric paradigms, and lays the foundations for a new interpretation of IOW history.

Problems in the History of Modern Africa
Problems in the History of Modern Africa

Author: Robert O. Collins

Publisher:

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13:

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A presentation of important issues in the study of modern Africa. It addresses: decolonization and the end of Empire; democracy and the nation state; epidemics in Africa - the human and financial costs; development - failure or success; the African environment - origins of a crisis; and more.

The Merchant Houses of Mocha
The Merchant Houses of Mocha

Author: Nancy Um

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2011-12-01

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0295800232

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Gaining prominence as a seaport under the Ottomans in the mid-1500s, the city of Mocha on the Red Sea coast of Yemen pulsed with maritime commerce. Its very name became synonymous with Yemen's most important revenue-producing crop -- coffee. After the imams of the Qasimi dynasty ousted the Ottomans in 1635, Mocha's trade turned eastward toward the Indian Ocean and coastal India. Merchants and shipowners from Asian, African, and European shores flocked to the city to trade in Arabian coffee and aromatics, Indian textiles, Asian spices, and silver from the New World. Nancy Um tells how and why Mocha's urban shape and architecture took the forms they did. Mocha was a hub in a great trade network encompassing overseas cities, agricultural hinterlands, and inland market centers. All these connected places, together with the functional demands of commerce in the city, the social stratification of its residents, and the imam's desire for wealth, contributed to Mocha's architectural and urban form. Eventually, in the mid-1800s, the Ottomans regained control over Yemen and abandoned Mocha as their coastal base. Its trade and its population diminished and its magnificent buildings began to crumble, until few traces are left of them today. This book helps bring Mocha to life once again.

A Sea of Debt
A Sea of Debt

Author: Fahad Ahmad Bishara

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-03-10

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1107155657

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An innovative legal history of economic life in the Western Indian Ocean, charting the emergence of a trans-oceanic contractual culture.

Margins of the Market
Margins of the Market

Author: Johan Mathew

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2016-05-10

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 0520963423

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What is the relationship between trafficking and free trade? Is trafficking the perfection or the perversion of free trade? Trafficking occurs thousands of times each day at borders throughout the world, yet we have come to perceive it as something quite extraordinary. How did this happen, and what role does trafficking play in capitalism? To answer these questions, Johan Mathew traces the hidden networks that operated across the Arabian Sea in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Following the entangled history of trafficking and capitalism, he explores how the Arabian Sea reveals the gaps that haunt political borders and undermine economic models. Ultimately, he shows how capitalism was forged at the margins of the free market, where governments intervened, and traffickers turned a profit.

Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean
Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean

Author: K. N. Chaudhuri

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1985-03-07

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780521285421

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Before the age of Industrial Revolution, the great Asian civilisations constituted areas not only of high culture but also of advanced economic development.

Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia
Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia

Author: Gwyn Campbell

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2004-11-23

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 1135759170

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The abolition of slavery in and around the Western Indian Ocean have been little studied. This collection examines the meaning of slavery and its abolition in relation to specific indigenous societies and to Islam, a religion that embraced the entire region, and draws comparisons between similar developments in the Atlantic system. Case studies include South Africa, Mauritius, Madagascar, the Benadir Coast, Arabia, the Persian Gulf and India. This volume marks an important new development in the study of slavery and its abolition in general, and an original approach to the history of slavery in the Indian Ocean and Asia regions.

Fluid Networks and Hegemonic Powers in the Western Indian Ocean
Fluid Networks and Hegemonic Powers in the Western Indian Ocean

Author: Collectif

Publisher: Centro de Estudos Internacionais

Published: 2018-07-19

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13:

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The present volume sets forth to analyse illustrative aspects of the deep-rooted immersion of the populations of the eastern coasts of Africa in the vast network of commercial, cultural and religious interactions that extend to the Middle-East and the Indian subcontinent, as well as the long-time involvement of various exogenous military, administrative and economic powers (Ottoman, Omani, Portuguese, Dutch, British, French and, more recently, European-Americans).