Ivory & slaves in East Central Africa: Changing patterns of international trade to the later nineteenth century

Edward A. Alpers

Heinemann

Slavery and Resistance in Africa and Asia: Bonds of Resistance

Gwyn Campbell

Michael Salman

Routledge

For centuries East Africa had an integral place within the Indian Ocean world. While slave trading, slave raiding and their consequences provide one thematic focus, this book looks at Indian Ocean commercial networks that were more complex in the range of products exchanged, including luxury goods and staple food items, as well as enforced labor.

East Africa and the Indian Ocean

History

Africa

Markus Wiener Publishers

<p>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.</p>

Markus Wiener

<p>This collection of essays by new and seasoned scholars presents cutting-edge research on the history of Africa and the African Diasporas. The chapters ask new questions, query old assumptions, and open new fields of inquiry. While the essays are broad-ranging, three major themes found throughout the volume bind the chapters together. With a newfound focus on biographies, the volume explores Africans in the Diaspora, problematizes mobility and population displacement, and nuances resistance as a ubiquitous aspect of African history. Throughout the volume Africans are seen moving voluntarily, by necessity, or by force both within the continent and beyond it. Wherever they are, Africans are also resisting struggling to improve their circumstances and, in the process, preserve their agency in defiance of coercive authority. In their respective ways, the chapters move beyond generalizations and abstractions to render subaltern groups and individual lives visible and comprehensible on their own terms. In compiling this volume, the editors were fully cognizant of the fact that some of these themes can be brought into focus, while the full import of the others remains just over the horizon. Hence, Changing Horizons invites further studies and asks more questions than it answers, raising new questions about the history of Africa and the African Diasporas.</p>

Changing Horizons of African History

EDITORS

Awet T. Weldemichael

Anthony A. Lee

Africa World+press

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Books by Edward A. Alpers