Special Issue: Red Sea Connectivities in the Shadow of Imperialism

This special issue originated in discussions at a workshop on "Cooperation, Coercion and Compulsion across the Red Sea from the Eighteenth Century to the Present" held at the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin on 4–5 June 2015 and sponsored by the VolkswagenStiftung and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In viewing the Red Sea world as a multifaceted socioeconomic system that connected the African and Arabian littorals, the workshop reflected recent trends in the study of the region as an historical space with its own dynamics and evolution. Northeast Africa Studies helped launch this discussion with its 2012 issue on "Space, Mobility, and Translocal Connections across the Red Sea Area since 1500," edited by Jonathan Miran (NEAS 12, no. 1). The editors are grateful to Steven Serels for helping assemble and edit the current set of contributions, which add exciting new themes and case studies to the discussion, utilizing a wide range of commercial and administrative records, family papers, and literary sources.

Like other large navigable bodies of water, the Red Sea historically facilitated the movement of people, goods, and ideas from different continents, giving rise to maritime and migration networks that often transcended ethnic, linguistic, and political divides. The creation, maintenance, and evolution of these networks have been and continue to be dependent on the cooperation of a diverse set of actors. The Berlin workshop, along with the papers which came out of it, focused on the period from the end of the eighteenth century to the present, during which time the Red Sea social system was being transformed by larger political, economic, technological, and environmental changes. In response to these changes, individual and collective strategies based upon cooperation, coercion, and compulsion had to be adjusted. For some people, this meant improved personal security and new economic opportunity. For others, it meant greater instability and an increase in the precariousness of everyday life.