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Inland from Mombasa [electronic resource] : East Africa and the making of the Indian Ocean world / David P. Bresnahan

Author
Bresnahan, David P.
Published
Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2025]
Physical Description
1 online resource
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Contents
Introduction -- Unmoored from the ocean -- Looking inland, to the world -- The inland underpinnings of Indian Ocean commerce -- Inland villages and oceanic empires -- From Mijikenda city to Busaidi backwater -- Conclusion -- Appendix 1 : Placing East African languages in time and space -- Appendix 2 : Mijikenda dialects -- Appendix 3 : Lexical reconstructions and distributions.
Summary
"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 selected by Mijikenda speakers were in fact key to their active role in global commerce and politics"--
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ISBN
9780520400498 (ebook)
9780520400481 (paperback)
Bibliography Note
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Terms of Use and Reproduction
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) license. To view a copy of the license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .
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