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9 Cultural diffusion in the Atlantic Age American Crops in Eastern Africa A closing theme of importance for the use of language evidence in history revolves around what the diffusion of individual words for new items of culture can reveal about the diffusion of things and ideas. A historical context highly illustrative of the revelatory powers of this documentation is the Atlantic Age. Unprecedented changes pervaded the world over the course of that age, from the middle fieenth century into the twentieth century. new items of material culture, new crops, and new ideas passed back and forth across and around the world, following the expanding new networks of exchange and movement of people and goods. With those movements of things and ideas spread the words that named them. by no means is the Atlantic Age alone in this respect. A similarly powerful flow of things and ideas out of and through the ancient Levant is evident in the diffusion of innumerable words for new products, new crops, new technology, and new gods and beliefs westward through the Mediterranean world over the course of the second and first millennia bCE and the very early first millennium CE. other similarly complex influences, documented in the lexical evidence, spread in the preceding millennia within, and northward and eastward from, Mesopotamia and Anatolia. still other major spheres of interaction before the Atlantic Age, where lexical documentation has the same historical explanatory power, encompassed the indian ocean, Mesoamerica, and East Asia. Many separate periods of diffusion outward of cultural influences, beliefs, and technology from China stand out, 221 is chapter revises C. Ehret, “East African Words and ings: Agricultural Aspects of Economic Transformation in the nineteenth Century,” in b.A. ogot (ed.), Kenya in the Nineteenth Century (nairobi: Anyange Press, 1986). 222 Chapter 9 for example, in the word borrowing evidence in Japanese, Korean, and southeast Asian languages. is chapter deals with one arena of such change, eastern Africa, belonging to the Atlantic Age, and it focuses on just one of the numerous facets in this unprecedented history—the introduction and long-distance spread of new crops. in doing so it illustrates the power of the study of lexical diffusions to reveal both expected and unexpected facets of the movement of things, people, and ideas; to provide information where written documentation fails; and to raise questions and issues of global relevance for understanding the formative age of the world we live in. For eastern Africa in the overall span from the 1400s to the 1900s, the nineteenth century stands out as a period of especially rapid transformation. e characteristic and unifying theme of the period was the penetration deep into the East African interior of motivations and interests generated outside the continent—spread during most of the century through the expanding web of Waswahili trading contacts and culminating at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century in the rather abrupt European imposition of direct political and economic control. but although this common thread running through nineteenth-century events helps give sense and order to that history, it cannot be considered the summation of all significant change. e interest of East African nineteenth-century history lies primarily in the variety of ways peoples responded locally to new knowledge and in the cumulative transformations brought about by the availability and acquisition of new tools and possessions. ese transformations took place both ahead of and aer direct contact with Waswahili or Europeans. studies in local political history have been and remain popular approaches among historians of East Africa to uncovering nineteenth-century developments. e equally essential historical task of locating , in time and space, the specific changes in knowledge and material culture that took place among East Africans in that era have only too oen been le aside. one aspect of such cumulative change, oen of considerable eventual economic importance, was the introduction of crops native to the Americas. A number of such crops became known at the East African coast prior to the nineteenth century. some spread inland only with the establishment of Waswahili caravan routes or colonial communications, while others spread significantly earlier in time. e linguistic investigation of agricultural change reminds us also that the boundaries and spheres of interaction do not extend immutably back in time. in the nineteenth century and before, human contact and the spread of ideas and things were not constrained by present...

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