Inland from Mombasa: East Africa and the Making of the Indian Ocean World

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Over the past few decades, scholars have traced how Indian Ocean merchants forged transregional networks into a world of global connections. East Africa's crucial role in this Indian Ocean world has primarily been understood through the influence of coastal trading centers like Mombasa. In Inland from Mombasa, David P. Bresnahan looks anew at this Swahili port city from the vantage point of the communities that lived on its rural edges. By reconstructing the deep history of these Mijikenda-speaking societies over the past two millennia, he shows how profoundly they influenced global trade even as they rejected many of the cosmopolitan practices that historians have claimed are critical to creating global connections, choosing smaller communities over urbanism, local ritual practices over Islam, and inland trade over maritime commerce. Inland from Mombasa makes the compelling case that the seemingly isolating alternative social pursuits engaged in by Mijikenda speakers were in fact key to their active role in global commerce and politics.