East Africa and the Indian Ocean (review)

During a distinguished career that spans more than thirty-five years, Edward Alpers has become well known not only for his work on the social and economic history of East Africa during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but also for his determination to situate the history of this region in the broader context of the Indian Ocean world. This volume brings together nine of Alpers's articles on various aspects of East African and western Indian Ocean history published previously in scholarly journals and anthologies. Six of these pieces first appeared in print between 1976 and 1984, while three were published more recently in 2000, 2001, and 2007.

These articles are grouped into three geographically defined sections. The first focuses on the western Indian Ocean; it includes papers that examine trade links and commercial relations between Gujarat and the East African coast from circa 1500 to 1800, regional food trading networks in the western Indian Ocean during the nineteenth century, and an overview of the role that islands played in shaping various developments in the western Indian Ocean. The book's second section concentrates on coastal East Africa, with articles that examine the history of nineteenth-century Muqdisho (Mogadishu) within a broader regional context, continuity and change in the traditional cotton textile industry in southern Somalia from circa 1840 to 1980, and spirit possession cults among Swahili women during the nineteenth century. The Mozambique Channel is the focus of the volume's last three essays, which explore the dynamics and impact of raids by the Sakalava in Madagascar on the Comoros and the Mozambican coast from 1800 to 1820, the complex relationships between Mozambique and the Comoros during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and a broad survey of the factors that have shaped social life and organization along the Mozambican littoral.

The last decade has witnessed increasing scholarly interest in reconstructing the complex social, economic, cultural, and political links among various parts of eastern Africa and between this region and the western Indian Ocean, and this volume is a welcome addition to this expanding body of work for reasons other than its value as a collection of interesting essays in this field of inquiry. Alpers's articles remind us that careful, informed research in multiple archives can pay handsome dividends in terms of deepening our understanding of various aspects of East African history and this region's multifaceted ties with the wider Indian Ocean world. Equally important, these articles direct our attention, if only implicitly, to the need to explore other important but hitherto ignored topics that bear directly on our understanding of East African history. His 1984 paper on the nineteenth-century western Indian Ocean as a regional food network (chapter 2 in the present work) is a striking case in point. The collection would have benefited from an added essay in which Alpers discussed his own research and that of other scholars working on this part of the world, with a view to framing issues and questions that future research agendas should consider.