A Material Culture: Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Wynne-Jones
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Eastern Africa ◽  
Eastern Coast ◽  
African Continent ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Trading Economy ◽  
Indian Ocean World ◽  
Trading Networks

Africa’s eastern littoral borders the Indian Ocean, providing the setting for the settlements, people, and language known collectively as Swahili, which have been a key part of that ocean’s trading networks for at least two millennia. Graeco-Roman sailors visited the now-forgotten metropolis of Rhapta, and their voyages were recorded in the narratives that later became the first-century Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (Casson 1989). Traces of that early contact survive in the form of beads and coins, yet are limited in number and diffuse in nature (Chami and Msemwa 1997a; Horton 1990). From the seventh century onwards, a series of more permanent settlements began to monopolize this trade; by the eleventh century some of these had grown into towns that were able to control and provide a focus for the mercantile opportunities of the Indian Ocean. The trading economy of Swahili towns was based on the wealth of the African continent—gold and ivory were particularly valuable exports—and underlain by a mixed economy and diverse population of fishers and farmers, traders and craft-workers (Horton and Middleton 2000; Kusimba 2008). By the ‘golden age’ of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Swahili were an African society of considerable cosmopolitanism and fame, with towns like Kilwa Kisiwani known throughout the medieval world (Sutton 1993, 1997). Swahili archaeology is focused, conceptually and methodologically, on the series of stone towns that grew up along Africa’s eastern coast from the end of the first millennium AD. These towns developed as key nodes in both local and international networks of interaction, and became the conduits through which the African continent traded and communicated with the wider Indian Ocean world. The material settings of the towns, and particularly the distinctive tradition of coral architecture they contain, embody their cosmopolitanism, with this locally derived building tradition creating unique urban spaces that nevertheless reference the Islamic architecture of the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf (Garlake 1966). Archaeology on this coast is still relatively new, dating back only to the 1950s and 1960s, and to the pioneering work of researchers convinced they had discovered evidence for Arab trading stations on the coast of eastern Africa (Kirkman 1964).

A Material Culture

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Wynne-Jones
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Eastern Africa ◽  
Alternative Form ◽  
Significant Case ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Indian Ocean World

A Material Culture focuses on objects in Swahili society through the elaboration of an approach that sees both people and things as caught up in webs of mutual interaction. It therefore provides both a new theoretical intervention in some of the key themes in material culture studies, including the agency of objects and the ways they were linked to social identities, through the development of the notion of a biography of practice. These theoretical discussions are explored through the archaeology of the Swahili, on the Indian Ocean coast of eastern Africa. This coast was home to a series of "stonetowns" (containing coral architecture) from the ninth century AD onwards, of which Kilwa Kisiwani is the most famous, considered here in regional context. These stonetowns were deeply involved in maritime trade, carried out among a diverse, Islamic population. This book suggests that the Swahili are a highly-significant case study for exploration of the relationship between objects and people in the past, as the society was constituted and defined through a particular material setting. Further, it is suggested that this relationship was subtly different than in other areas, and particularly from western models that dominate prevailing analysis. The case is made for an alternative form of materiality, perhaps common to the wider Indian Ocean world, with an emphasis on redistribution and circulation rather than on the accumulation of wealth. The reader will therefore gain familiarity with a little-known and fascinating culture, as well as appreciating the ways that non-western examples can add to our theoretical models.

scholarly journals Coffee: An Indian Ocean Perspective

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 61-81
Author(s):  
Shane J. Barter
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Eastern Africa ◽  
Coffee Production ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
History Of ◽  
Coffee Farmers ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Indian Ocean World

Abstract Studies of coffee production and consumption are dominated by emphases on Latin American production and American consumption. This paper challenges the Atlantic perspective, demanding an equal emphasis on the Indian Ocean world of Eastern Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. A geographical approach to historical as well as contemporary patterns of coffee production and consumption provides an opportunity to rethink the nature of coffee as a global commodity. The Indian Ocean world has a much deeper history of coffee, and in recent decades, has witnessed a resurgence in production. The nature of this production is distinct, providing an opportunity to rethink dependency theories. Coffee in the Indian Ocean world is more likely to be produced by smallholders, countries are less likely to be economically dependent on coffee, farmers are more likely to harvest polycultures, and countries represent both consumers and producers. A balanced emphasis of Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds allows us to better understand coffee production and consumption, together telling a more balanced, global story of this important commodity.

Forty Years On

2019 ◽  
pp. 17-51
Author(s):  
Edward A. Alpers
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
East Africa ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Eastern Africa ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Indian Ocean World

Almost forty years ago, the author published an article on Gujarat and East Africa from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Although several other scholars had written serious historical works either about or including Indian traders in eastern Africa in the modern period, at the time it was a pioneering piece for historians of East Africa. While the author has written and continues to write about the African diaspora in the Indian Ocean world and, more recently, the islands of this vast oceanic space now referred to as Indian Ocean Africa, he has not again written anything specifically about Gujarat and the Indian Ocean, nor about Gujarati traders in East Africa. This chapter attempts to review the last forty years of scholarship written in English on Gujarat and the Indian Ocean with a focus on transregional trade and traders. What is hoped from this overview is a sense of how current debates have developed over these decades and where further research is called for.

Africans in the Indian Ocean World

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard B. Allen
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Arabian Gulf ◽  
Eastern Africa ◽  
High Morbidity ◽  
Indonesian Archipelago ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
The Persian Gulf ◽  
Indian Ocean World ◽  
The 19Th Century

The African diaspora in the Indian Ocean is inextricably intertwined with slavery and slave trading in an oceanic world that encompasses southern and eastern Africa, the Red Sea, the Persian (or Arabian) Gulf, South Asia, the Indonesian archipelago, and parts of East Asia. A combination of factors, including the cost of free labor, high morbidity and mortality rates from diseases such as malaria and smallpox, and the perceived attributes of different African peoples spurred the exportation by Arab, Muslim, and Swahili merchants of an estimated 2.9–3.65 million men, women, and children from diverse populations in southern and eastern Africa, Madagascar, and the Horn of Africa to Arabia, the Persian Gulf, South Asia, and Southeast Asia between 800 and c.1900. European involvement in this transoceanic slave trade began during the early 16th century and continued well into the 19th century. This diaspora’s legacy includes the presence of communities of African descent in modern Iran, India, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia.

scholarly journals Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the ‘Early Modern’: Historiographical Conventions and Problems

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 24
Author(s):  
Gwyn Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
World Economy ◽  
Eastern Africa ◽  
African History ◽  
Conventional View ◽  
The People ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
Indian Ocean World

European-inspired scholarship underscores conventional academic consensus that African commercial entrepeneurship disappeared with the European voyages of discovery, and subsequent implantation of the Potuguese, Dutch, English, and French commercial empires. Thus the people of eastern Africa are portrayed largely as technologically backward and isolated from the main currents of global history from about 1500 until the onset of modern European colonialism from the close of the nineteenth century. This article argues that the conventional view needs to be challenged, and that Eastern African history in the period 1500-1800 needs to be revised in the context of an Indian Ocean world economy.

scholarly journals Securing Trade: The Military Labor of the British Occupation of Manila, 1762–1764

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (S27) ◽  
pp. 125-147
Author(s):  
Megan C. Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Port City ◽  
British Occupation ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Indian Ocean World ◽  
Trading Networks ◽  
The Military

AbstractMilitary labor played a key role in conquering and preserving ports as nodes in trading networks. This article treats the military labor of the British occupation of Manila from 1762 to 1764, during the Seven Years War. It examines the motley crew that formed the British forces, exploring British categories of military laborers sent from Madras. The particular combination of forces composed for this expedition had more to do with the East India Company's concerns in Madras than with what was thought to be needed to take and hold Manila. These military laborers were sometimes unruly, insisting on better pay, and deserting when it was not forthcoming. The story of the British occupation of Manila highlights how ideas about desertion traveled along with military laborers from one port city to another in the Indian Ocean world, and what happened when they did.

Glass Beads and Trade in the Western Indian Ocean

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marilee Wood
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
East Coast ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
Glass Beads ◽  
Eastern Africa ◽  
Eastern Coast ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Plant Ash

The glass beads found at archaeological sites up and down the eastern coast of Africa between the 7th and 17th centuries ce bear witness to the trade that connected communities from all reaches of the Indian Ocean and beyond. Glass beads are small, relatively inexpensive to produce, and easy to transport as well as being colorful, often beautiful, and very durable. They were thus ideal trade items, especially when glass was a rare commodity that was produced in a limited number of places. Careful study of the glass beads traded into eastern Africa illuminate trade connections and patterns in the Western Indian Ocean that are not seen through a study of ceramics or glass vessels. In the earliest period, from the 7th to the mid-10th century, the East Coast (Kenya and Tanzania) first received beads made from a mineral soda glass from Sri Lanka (or possibly South India). The next to arrive were all made of a type of plant-ash glass that was probably produced in Iraq, but, because raw glass was widely traded, the beads were made in different places: perhaps the Persian Gulf/Iraq/Iran and even Thailand. In southern Africa in this period all beads were made of this same plant-ash glass but the beads—cut from drawn tubes—may have been finished locally. Similar beads of this glass have been found around the Old World including South and Southeast Asia, both East and West Africa, the Mediterranean, and as far north as Scandinavia—all date from the 8th into the mid-10th century. From the mid-10th to mid-13th century mineral soda beads from India were found in both the southern and northern regions of Africa’s east coast, but many of them appear to be from different areas of India and would likely have arrived by different routes. In the mid-13th to mid-15th century period, during which the gold trade out of southern Africa was at its peak, southern Africa turned away from Indian beads and accepted only ones from a region that has yet to be identified, while East Africa continued mainly with ones from South Asia. However, early in the 15th century a small number of Chinese beads appeared on the East Coast that might have arrived on ships from the fleet of the Chinese general Zheng He. The final period, the mid-15th to late 17th century, saw the two ends of the coast receiving the same beads for the first time, reflecting the growing dominance of European traders in the Indian Ocean. Although from their first arrival Europeans had attempted to trade their own beads in eastern Africa, populations there refused to accept them, forcing the outsiders to purchase beads in India, for which they were obliged to pay—often in silver.

Seats and Sites of Authority: British Colonial Collecting on the East African Coast

2018 ◽  
pp. 116-134
Author(s):  
Sarah Longair
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
African Continent ◽  
East African ◽  
East African Coast ◽  
Arabian Nights ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
British Colonial

For over a thousand years, the Swahili culture of coastal East Africa had developed by synthesising myriad influences from the African continent, Arabia and across the Indian Ocean. By the mid-Victorian period Zanzibar was a key Indian Ocean commercial centre, and in 1890 was established as a British Protectorate. This chapter examines, through writings, collections of material culture and photographs, the British encounter with Zanzibar and the island’s cosmopolitan culture. British officers described themselves as going to ‘the East’ when departing for the island. The word itself epitomised mysterious otherness and exoticism, while its Arabian-Nights charm contrasted with the stereotypes about the African interior. Yet its skyline was criticised for lacking minarets and domes and being insufficiently Islamic. It was also described as unhealthy and dirty, making British intervention necessary to transform it into ‘an island paradise’. This chapter analyses how the British response to Zanzibar as a liminal space between Africa and the East shifted in this period of economic and political transformation on the coast.

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