Inland From Mombasa PDF Download

Over the past few decades, scholars have traced how oceanic merchants forged transregional networks into an "Indian Ocean world" of global connections. East Africa's crucial role has primarily been understood through the influence of coastal trading centers like Mombasa. In this book, David 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 as critical in 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 far from insulating the Mijikenda speakers, the alternative social pursuits they selected were key to their active role in global commerce and politics.