Fetishizing the Foot: Mobility and Meaning in Indian Ocean Sandals

Geographically positioned between inland eastern and central Africa and the Indian Ocean, the Swahili coast has fascinated scholars for centuries if not millennia. One of the earliest texts addressing this region is the frequently cited Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a mid-first century ce text detailing trade and navigational information for the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. Western scholars have struggled with how to categorize coastal east Africa, at times claiming it as part of a broader Middle Eastern cultural sphere, and at others labelling it as specifically African. Stephanie Wynne-Jones and Adria LaViolette's The Swahili World adds to and complicates these discourses by presenting fifty-six studies by sixty-one authors on various topics related to the study of coastal eastern Africa. This edited volume works across a broad time period, ranging from the first century ce to the present day. Through these collected studies Wynne-Jones and LaViolette bring together varied discourses in order to highlight the complex historical and historiographic processes that come to bear on Swahili coast studies.Wynne-Jones and LaViolette divided their volume into three broadly defined sections roughly organized according to theme and chronology: environment, background, and Swahili historiography; the Swahili age; and the early modern and modern Swahili coast. Within these sections, various subsections highlight the environment, scholarship on the Swahili world, the formation of the Swahili coast, urbanism, daily life, trade, architecture, and colonialism. This project brings together researchers working in a variety of fields from institutions across the globe. As both Wynne-Jones and LaViolette are archaeologists, these studies are more heavily weighted towards archaeological work, including contributions by Thomas Biginagwa, Paul Sinclair, Jeffrey Fleisher, Felix Chami, and Dashu Qin, among many others. However, it also includes studies by historians, art historians, anthropologists, independent scholars, museum professionals, and environmental scientists. These are individuals working in the United States, Kenya, Tanzania, the United Kingdom, China, Sweden, Germany, France, Norway, Australia, Canada, South Africa, Italy, Spain, and Madagascar. Such a diverse assemblage represents a truly novel undertaking in Swahili coast studies, bringing together disciplines that often draw from each other, but may not be in direct communication as they are here.Within these sections a number of themes regularly surface throughout the edited volume, namely, the complex nature of Swahili coast historiography, the diversity and plurality of notions of the Swahili coast, urbanism and stone architecture, trade and connectivity, and the colonial legacy. The continued emergence of these themes encourages readers to reconsider the nature of area studies boundaries, cultural property, historiographic privilege, and eastern Africa's place in a global world order.Questions of historiography arise early on, with Wynne-Jones and LaViolette's introductory chapter raising the question of how the term “Swahili” is applied, when, and to what effect. They argueDespite this, Swahili, proto-Swahili, and pre-Swahili are all used regularly throughout the volume, regardless of time frame, and the hunt for an “originary moment” for the formation of the Swahili coast plagues several studies. In “Decoding the Genetic Ancestry of the Swahili,” Ryan L. Raaum and his coauthors use DNA sampling to definitively argue for a largely African ancestry to Swahili coast urbanism and cultural development with “a trickle of non-African males into Swahili communities over a long period of time” (p. 98). In contrast, Paul Sinclair argues against “searching for the original spark that resulted in the florescence of Swahili architectural, economic, trading and literary achievements” and instead emphasizes the “likelihood of a multi-centered developmental trajectory of urban complexity in the region,” which means “acknowledging the abilities of agropastoralist and farming communities along the coast in creating conditions to attract and actively participate in trade and exchange, with all of its ensuing consequences” (p. 190).Rather than developing a definable framework for who the Swahili are and when and where they originate, what emerges throughout these chapters is a truly diverse sense of Swahili geographies and cultures. As Abungu et al. note, the Swahili coast has been classically defined as the “area between the southern Somalia coast and northern Mozambique … dotted with stone-built settlements of domestic houses, mosques, tombs, wells and well-planned narrow streets running north-south and east-west” (p. 642). However, various authors throughout this volume add to and contest this narrow definition. For instance, Anneli Ekblom and Paul Sinclair include Chibuene in south-central Mozambique as part of this diverse coastal trading culture. Similarly, Henry T. Wright states that “The Comorian Archipelago is an intimate part of” the Swahili world (p. 266), and Chantal Radimilahy shows the interconnections between Mahilaka in northern Madagascar and coastal Kenya and Tanzania.Within this expanding geography, internal differentiations and divisions have also become increasingly important. City-states participated in maritime trade to varying degrees at different points in time. For instance, Zanzibar saw unprecedented levels of maritime trade between 1100 and 1400 ce and again when the Omani Būsa’īdī Sultan Sa’īd named Zanzibar as his capital in the nineteenth century. In contrast, Pawlowicz notes thatIt was not until the sixteenth century that these communities adopted a more Indian Ocean-centric outlook, a time that saw economic decline for many other major cities in this region, such as Kilwa and Zanzibar. Within these cities, we also see varying degrees of class and gender distinction. Wynne-Jones highlights how women likely played a more active public role in the early modern period (p. 295). And several articles note that the distinction between upper and lower classes was less structured prior to the nineteenth century. Stone and earthen architecture were often built side-by-side, Bissell noting that “Swahili structures could be expanded and solidified over time” to effectively become stone (p. 593).This purported distinction between stone and earthen architecture is at the center of Swahili coast studies, where stone is seen as a necessary quality of urban formation. However, several authors in this volume reference the ongoing relationships and continuities between cities, towns, and villages, as well as the continuities and coexistence of stone and earthen architecture. There was never a simple divide between wealthy, urban patricians with stone homes and poor, rural farmers with earthen ones. Cities depended on neighboring towns and villages for trade goods and sustenance, and individuals often moved within and between these spaces quite freely.Various authors demonstrate throughout this volume how mobility and exchange are visible in the transfer of raw goods, finished products, people, and ideas across Africa and the Indian Ocean. Ceramics represent one of the largest assemblages in the archaeological record, and they demonstrate a broad exchange of technologies and designs from southern Somalia to Mozambique to the Comoros. A type of low-fired ceramic with incised geometric decoration known as Triangular-Incised Ware (TIW) or Early Tana Tradition (ETT) ceramics was popular across these sites, indicating a high degree of communication relating to production and design practices. More broadly, Morales and Prendergast point out that the local and global uses of cowries show the incredible importance of Swahili coast sites in regional and transregional trade networks (p. 345). Indeed, mobility and exchange were such a regular fixture of coastal life that it can be difficult to assign meaningful geographic or cultural labels to objects and ideas. Erik Gilbert discusses this in his chapter on dhow trading vessels, in which he notes that the distinction between an “eastern African” or “South Arabian” ship is rarely clear cut. Indeed, the dhow's “owner might be from one place, its captain from another, its crew from yet another, and the ship itself might be constructed someplace that neither owner, captain, nor crew called home” (p. 383). Clearly, traditional area studies boundaries fall short in addressing the complex ways in which residents of east Africa associated with their environments.At the heart of each of these themes, the impact of colonial policy making can be readily felt. The desire to define “the Swahili” emerged from colonial processes of classification, ordering the world into neat categories of “African” or “Arab,” categories which residents of the Swahili coast casually and purposefully resisted. Claiming a Swahili identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries implied an urban, civilized identity. However, Daren Ray notes that by the second quarter of the twentieth century, many who had previously claimed a Swahili identity had subsequently adopted the label “Shirazi” because Swahili had acquired an implied inferior status (p. 70). The legacy of these labels is particularly well addressed in Lydia Wilson Marshall and Herman Kiriama's “The Legacy of Slavery on the Swahili Coast.” In this chapter, the authors explore the ties between ethnic labels, land ownership, and political rights in nineteenth and twentieth century eastern Africa. Their study shows how the oft-cited abolition date of 1897 obscures the ongoing legacies of forced labor, land dispossession, and political and social alienation faced by those with slave descent throughout east Africa.In many instances, these chapters do not necessarily present newly documented research, but rather a synthesis of the various projects undertaken on particular cities or topics related to Swahili coast studies. Exceptions to this include LaViolette's chapter on “Craft and Industry” or William Cunningham Bissell's interrogation of “The Modern Life of Swahili Stonetowns.” Additionally, the fact that many of these chapters provide synthesis of and commentary on established research should not detract from their value. Indeed, the amassing of these studies into a single, coherent volume represents an enormous undertaking on the part of Wynne-Jones and LaViolette and should mark The Swahili World as the standard text for newcomers to the field, as well as established scholars.Considering the diverse and complex views approached throughout Wynne-Jones and LaViolette's volume, The Swahili World will appeal to a range of audiences. However, it will hold special interest for students and scholars of the Arabian Peninsula, Indian Ocean, and East Africa. At times the language assumes a specialist's knowledge. For instance, Wright's chapters on the Comoros repeatedly use the terms “Dembeni phase” and “Hanyundu phase” without defining them. And the confusion caused by the changing uses of Swahili, pre-Swahili, and proto-Swahili by different authors could have been alleviated with disclaimers in the introduction or with authors each defining the terms used for themselves. Indeed, Radimilahy's assertion that Mahilaka was originally a Swahili town begs the question of why such a descriptive marker is significant, particularly for the time period she is discussing (roughly 900–1500 ce). Why should Radimilahy want to claim the term “Swahili” for northern Madagascar?Additionally, for those consulting it as a coherent volume rather than as individual studies, a stronger framing in the introduction and conclusion could have added more depth to the text as a whole. Unsurprisingly, given the diverse topics and scholars represented, a number of the studies reflect conflicting and contradictory viewpoints. For instance, Tom Fitton's assertion that “Zanzibar's history can be seen as a microcosm of the wider Swahili coast,” (p. 239) is at odds with the plural histories presented elsewhere in the volume. Jeffrey Fleisher's investigation of “Town and Village” underscores the very different urban trajectories of Mtwapa, Pemba, Kilwa, Lamu, Songo Mnara, Mikindani, and the Comoros, trajectories seemingly at odds with the claim that Zanzibar is a microcosm of the history of coastal eastern Africa. Fitton's understanding of Zanzibar is not unpopular within the field of Swahili coast studies, where stonetowns such as Kilwa, Zanzibar, Mombasa, and Lamu are seen as paradigmatic icons of Swahili history and culture. For many, however, such views obscure the fact that cities, towns, and villages were temporally, geographically, and economically contingent spaces with different access to and engagement in maritime and terrestrial trade. Highlighting these conflicting historiographic trends might have allowed for a more productive tension between chapters.Ultimately, The Swahili World presents a fascinating overview of the complex and, at times, contradictory nature of Swahili coast studies. The various articles, written by a diverse set of authors, provide thoughtful and nuanced investigations, which effectively link together the fields of archaeology, anthropology, art history, and environmental science, among others. The range of approaches and material covered should make The Swahili World a standard text for scholars of eastern Africa and the Indian Ocean alike. Through their work, Wynne-Jones and LaViolette have brought together a truly thought-provoking volume that will continue to prompt new conversations about Africa's role in medieval and early modern globalization.

Carnival in Africa

Cunning Distortions: Folk Christianity and Witchcraft Allegations in Early Mormon History

ANCIENT: Edessa ‘the Blessed City’. By J. B. Segal ANCIENT: Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of st. Augustine. By R. A. Markus ANCIENT: Bread and the Liturgy: The Symbolism of Early Christian and Byzantine Bread Stamps. By George Galavaris MEDIEVAL: Life in Anglo‐Saxon England. By R. I. Page MEDIEVAL: The Entry of the Slavs into Christendom. By A. P. Vlasto MEDIEVAL: It is a pleasure to welcome a new edition of Cecily Clark's edition of the Peterborough Chronicle, 1070–1154 MEDIEVAL: The Age of Chivalry. Manners and Morals 1000–1450. By C. T. Wood MEDIEVAL: The Knight and Chivalry. By Richard Barber MEDIEVAL: Scripta Leonis, Rufini et Angeli Sociorum s. Francisci. The Writings of leo, Rufino and Angelo Companions of st. Francis. Edited and translated by Rosalind B. Brooke MEDIEVAL: Irrigation and Society in Medieval Valencia. By Thomas F. Glick MEDIEVAL: English Historical Documents: vol. iv, 1327–1485. Edited by A. R. Myers MEDIEVAL: Bernardo Giustiniani. A Venetian of the Quattrocento. By Patricia H. Labalme MEDIEVAL: The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity. By Roberto Weiss MEDIEVAL: The Imperial Age of Venice, 1380–1580. By D. S. Chambers MEDIEVAL: The Three Ages of the Italian Renaissance. By Robert S. Lopez MEDIEVAL: Geoffrey Trease's the Condottieri EARLY MODERN: The Foundations of the Modern World 1300–1775. By L. Gottschalk, L. C. Mackinney and E. H. Pritchard EARLY MODERN: Monastic Iconography in France from the Renaissance to the Revolution. By Joan Evans EARLY MODERN: Tudor Royal Proclamations. Edited by Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin EARLY MODERN: Theatre of the World. By Frances A. Yates EARLY MODERN: La Plume, la Faucille et le Marteau: Institutions et Societe en France du Moyen age a la Revolution. By Roland Mousnier EARLY MODERN: The French Nobility in Crisis, 1560–1640. By Davis Bitton EARLY MODERN: Les Oeconomies Royales de Sully, Volume 1, 1572–1594. Edited by David Buisseret and Bernard Barbiche EARLY MODERN: Change in the Provinces: The Seventeenth Century. By Alan Everitt EARLY MODERN: Calvinism and the Amyraut Heresy. Protestant Scholasticism and Humanism in Seventeenth‐Century France. By Brian C. Armstrong EARLY MODERN: God's Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution. By Christopher Hill EARLY MODERN: Donald Veall takes a good subject in the Popular Movement for law Reform, 1640–1660 EARLY MODERN: Michael Landon also begins his the triumph of the Lawyers: Their Role in English Politics, 1678–1689 EARLY MODERN: Robert Harley, Puritan Politician. By Angus McInnes EARLY MODERN: New Cambridge Modern History Volume vi: The Rise of Great Britain and Russia 1688–1715/25. Edited by J. S. Bromley EARLY MODERN: The Growth of English Overseas Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Edited with an Introduction by W. E. Minchinton EARLY MODERN: Britain After the Glorious Revolution 1689–1715. By Geoffrey Holmes and others THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: The Ancien Régime in Europe: Government and Society in the Major States 1648–1789. By E. N. Williams THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Anglo‐American Political Relations, 1675–1775. Edited by Alison Gilbert Olson and Richard Maxwell Brown THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Muscovite and Mandarin. Russia's Trade with China and its Setting, 1727–1805. By C. M. Foust THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Philosopher king. the humanist pope benedict xiv. By Renée Haynes THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: The British Empire Before the American Revolution. vol. xv. A Guide to Manuscripts Relating to the History of the British Empire, 1748–1776. By Lawrence Henry Gipson THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: In his study of Shipping and the American war 1775–83 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: The Parkers at Saltram, 1769–89. Everyday life in an Eighteenth‐Century House. By Ronald Fletcher THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: The French Revolution. By François Furot and Denis Richot THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Biography is not a medium much used by present teachers of modern European history and Madame Roland and the age of Revolution by Gita May THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Napoleon and Paris. By Maurice Guerrini. Translated by Margery Weiner THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Power in the Industrial Revolution. By Richard L. Hills THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: The Textile Industry. By W. English THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Systèmes Agraires et Progrès Agricole: l'Assolement Triennal en Russie aux xviii e ‐xix e Siecles. By M. Confino THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: The First Industrial Nation. An Economic History of Britain 1700–1914. By Peter Mathias THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: The Foreign Ministers of Alexander I: Political Attitudes and the Conduct of Russian Diplomacy 1801–1825. By Patricia K. Grimsted THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Bureaucracy and Church Reform. the Organizational Response of the Church of England to Social Change 1800–1965. By Kenneth A. Thompson THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Father of Racist Ideology. The Social and Political Thought of Count Gobineau. By Michael D. Biddiss THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Marx Before Marxism. By David McLellan THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Baines's Account of the Woollen Manufacture of England. With a new Introduction by K. G. Ponting THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: The Victorian Crisis of Faith: Six Lectures. Edited by Anthony Symondson THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Popular Movements, C. 1830–1850. Edited by J. T. Ward THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: The Pauper Press. A Study of Working‐Class Radicalism of the 1830s. By Patricia Hollis THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: The war of the Unstamped. The Movement to Repeal the British Newspaper Tax, 1830–1836. By J. H. Wiener THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Free Trade: Theory and Practice from Adam Smith to Keynes. By N. McCord THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: The Dietary Surveys of Dr. Edward Smith. By T. C. Barker, D. J. 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By Walter Rodney AFRICA, ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA: Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast 1600–1720. By Kwame Yeboa Daaku AFRICA, ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA: Province of Freedom: A History of Sierra Leone 1787–1870. By John Peterson AFRICA, ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA: West African Countries and Peoples. By James Africanus Horton with an introduction by George Shepperson AFRICA, ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA: Pre‐Colonial African Trade. Essays on Trade in Central and Eastern Africa Before 1900. Edited by Richard Gray and David Birmingham AFRICA, ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA: Colonialism in Africa 1870–1960. vol. i: The History and Politics of Colonialism 1870–1914. Edited by L. H. Gann and Peter Duignan AFRICA, ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA: Reluctant Rebellion. The 1906–1908 Disturbances in Natal. By Shula Marks AFRICA, ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA: The Administration of Nigeria: Men, Methods and Myths. By I. F. Nicolson AFRIC

Disease, we have argued, influenced patterns of colonization, especially in West Africa, the Americas, and Australia (Chapter 2). In turn, imperial transport routes facilitated the spread of certain diseases, such as bubonic plague. This chapter expands our discussion of environmentally related diseases by focusing on trypanosomiasis, carried by tsetse fly, in East and Central Africa. Unlike plague, this disease of humans and livestock was endemic and restricted to particular ecological zones in Africa. But as in the case of plague, the changing incidence of trypanosomiasis was at least in part related to imperialism and colonial intrusion in Africa. Coastal East Africa presented some of the same barriers to colonization as West Africa. Portugal maintained a foothold in South-East Africa for centuries, and its agents expanded briefly onto the Zimbabwean plateau in the seventeenth century, but could not command the interior. Had these early incursions been more successful, southern Africa may have been colonized from the north, rather than by the Dutch and British from the south. Parts of East Africa were a source of slaves and ivory in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The trading routes, commanded by Arab and Swahili African networks, as well as Afro-Portuguese further south, were linked with the Middle East and the Indian Ocean. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, slave-holding expanded within enclaves of East Africa, such as the clove plantations of Zanzibar. When Britain attempted to abolish the slave trade in the early nineteenth century, and policed the West African coast, East and Central African sources briefly became more important for the Atlantic slave trade. African slaves from these areas were taken to Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean. Britain did not have the same intensity of contact with East Africa as with West and southern Africa until the late nineteenth century. There was no major natural resource that commanded a market in Europe and British traders had limited involvement in these slave markets. But between the 1880s and 1910s, most of East and Central Africa was taken under colonial rule, sometimes initially as protectorates: by Britain in Kenya and Uganda; Germany in Tanzania; Rhodes’s British South Africa Company in Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi; and by King Leopold of Belgium in the Congo.

Colonialism prevailed in Asia and Africa; in America there was colonialism. It was Great Britain which championed colonialism to an intense degree. Other European countries too had their colonies. After each colony attained independence, it so happened that colonialism was not rooted out, but a new type of colonialism persisted and manifested its primordial characteristics. My main objective is that British colonialism in East-Africa during 19 th century's; which was very much important for the economical causes like slave trade, various spices trade, etc. There are only few studies on the colonial history of British-east Africa. This article contains-how and why British interested there and its effect. It has also described their administrative system at that time.

While the use of Chinese porcelain dishes in the stone towns along the Swahili coast has recently found much attention in art historical scholarship regarding the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries, the pre-history of these dynamics in the medieval period has up to now only been fully considered in other fields such as archaeology and anthropology. This paper sheds new light on the interrelations between the built environment and material culture in coastal East Africa from an art historical perspective, focusing on premodern Indian Ocean trajectories, the role of Chinese porcelain bowls that were immured into Swahili coral stone buildings, and on architecture across boundaries in a medieval world characterized by far-reaching transcultural entanglements and connectivity. It will show how Chinese porcelain bowls in premodern Swahili architecture linked the stone towns along the coast with other sites both inland and across the Indian Ocean and beyond, and how these dynamics were shaped by complex intersections between short-distance and long-distance-relationships and negotiations between the local and the global along the Swahili coast and beyond.

British Logwood Extraction from the Mosquitia: The Origin of a Myth

Racism and Modernity: Festschrift for Wulf D. Hundt

Joseph Smith Jr. found himself in court many times throughout his life. Historians argue that his problematic relationship with the law began in 1826 when he faced disorderly person charges in Bainbridge, New York. According to the pretrial sources, some of Josiah Stowell's family members charged that Joseph Smith claimed to have supernatural powers: Horace Stowell and Arad Stowell claimed that he used seer stones to see lost, stolen, and hidden things and to seek treasure.1 An additional disorderly person hearing followed in 1829 in Lyons, New York. In 1830, a disorderly person charge brought Joseph Smith back to court in Bainbridge, New York. In the same year, a final disorderly person charge took him to court in Colesville, New York.2 Since these events, there has been a vigorous discussion over whether Smith's implication in these practices should disqualify his prophetic claims. This framing of the charges has sometimes overshadowed the legal debates.3Previous attempts to understand these legal events have assumed that these cases were built upon early examples of anti-fraud legislation.4 The basis of this interpretation is the use of the word "pretended" and allegations of "juggling," or sleight-of-hand, which appear in both New York's 1813 disorderly person statute and the accounts of Joseph Smith's court proceedings. However, reading these cases in terms of fraud may result from a cultural misunderstanding between modern researchers and their nineteenth-century subjects. For instance, Dan Vogel noted that Justice Neeley, who oversaw the 1826 case, was interested in allegedly pretended powers not economic deception.5This article proposes that Joseph Smith's early trials were about "pretended witchcraft and magic"6 and the related thoughtcrime of "pretended religion," categories of crime generated during the Enlightenment to categorize unorthodox religious traditions as witchcraft while negating their claims to miraculous or supernatural powers. Smith's defense that he really was a seer was irrelevant because the legal system categorized the spiritual practice of treasure seeking as pretended witchcraft and magic.To understand Joseph Smith's interactions with New York's 1813 disorderly person statute, historians must evaluate the historical and cultural trends associated with the legislative precedent that contributed to the 1813 statute. This comparative method has been a standard in witchcraft studies for decades.7 Throughout the analysis of these laws and charges, I use evidence from Joseph Smith's life outside the courtroom to demonstrate that fear of witchcraft motivated these charges while expressions of that fear were suppressed in the later narratives of these legal persecutions. Evidence outside the courtroom demonstrates that the conspiracies and persecutions endured by Joseph Smith were echoes of the witchcraft belief exemplified more than a century earlier in Salem, Massachusetts.The New York disorderly persons statue belongs to a specific legislative history aimed at magic and witchcraft. Legislation aimed at policing treasure seeking, the use of seer stones, and finding lost and stolen items through a gift from God or other supernatural means was meant to curb the influence of "the cunning-folk."8 Cunning-folk were folk-Christian healers whom religious authorities conflated with "diabolical witches" in early modern Europe, an imaginary category of people who were alleged to renounce their baptism and swear loyalty to the devil and his war on Christendom.9 Folk-Christian beliefs covered a range of magical practices. The King Henry Witchcraft Act of 1542 marked the earliest Anglophone legislation aimed at curbing treasure seeking. Queen Elizabeth's Witchcraft Act of 1563 repealed and replaced King Henry's Act and was subsequently superseded by the King James Witchcraft Act of 1604.10 All three intended to control the diabolical witch, but their language reveals their intent to penalize the cunning-folks' spiritual practices. This was also true of other acts passed throughout the British Isles.11 In 1692, the Massachusetts colony passed a witchcraft act based on the King James Act of 1604, explicitly targeted cunning-folk practices, including treasure seeking.12 This was the cornerstone upon which all Anglophone witchcraft legislation was founded, including the pretended witchcraft legislation of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.The cultural conversation around demonology informed this legislation's development. Early modern demonologies began in a Roman Catholic environment obsessed with controlling heresy.13 These works fused ideas from the Bible, Patristic writings of the early church, the Lives of Saints, Greco-Roman literature, and classical poetry to construct a historical foundation of the "witch" stereotype. This stereotype combined with diabolized depictions of popular fairy belief, folk-Christianity deemed superstitious by religious authorities, heresy, and popular concerns about maleficium. Continental believers' demonologies targeted the folk-Christian observances of the cunning-folk as examples of superstition and a living tradition of witchcraft.14 This tool could be abused against a wide variety of people regardless of the content of their beliefs and practices. For example, demonologist Nicholas Rémy claimed that a woman whose practices were completely orthodox could still be guilty of witchcraft, that witches were guilty of imitating Elijah and Elisha, and that witches were guilty of using religion to mask their alleged diabolism.15 Thus folk-Christian practices were easily distorted into diabolical witchcraft by religious and legal authorities.English demonologies appeared in the decades after the English Reformation when religious leaders led "a Henrician assault on popular religion."16 Fear of cunning-folk carried over to North America, where Cotton Mather attributed the rise of witchcraft in New England to the arrival of Quakers, cunning-folk, and Native American shamans.17 When Richard Boulton wrote one of the last significant believers' demonologies in England, paraphrasing Exodus 22:18, he asserted, "wise Women are not fit to live," without elaboration.18 He fully expected his eighteenth-century audience to understand that the cunning-folk were the witches targeted in English demonology and anti-witchcraft law. At the beginning of the Second Great Awakening, Ezra Stiles would preach a sermon conflating cunning-folk activities and Native American spiritual practices with witchcraft. He did so to "lay this whole Iniquity open, that all the remains of it might be rooted out."19 Concerns over the diabolical witch and the cunning-folk would continue in the Anglophone world into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.20Belief in the "diabolical witch" was the orthodox position between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, but there were also detractors. The Dutch physician Johann Weyer argued that the devil took advantage of imbalances in the humor of black bile to produce a mental illness (melancholy). He argued that the devil did so to generate illusions that deceived people into believing that witches were real and that magic was efficacious.21 Weyer still targeted cunning-folk practices and conflated them with necromancy, but he denied their efficacy. English skeptic Reginald Scott argued that the sorcerers of the Bible, the religious authorities of the pagan world, Catholic priests, and cunning-folk—whom he called "cozening witches"—all utilized sleight of hand and deception, not actual demonic powers, to lead people into idolatry or to deceive them.22 These skeptical demonologists described the beliefs and practices of pagan religions, Catholicism, Christian enthusiasts, and the cunning-folk as false prophecy, legerdemain, juggling, and pretended powers. They remained a vocal but marginalized position within demonology throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.By the eighteenth century, skeptical demonology replaced believing demonology as the dominant view, and unorthodox spiritual practices came to be defined as pretended by those in power. In the Anglophone world, this included the practices of cunning-folk, gypsies, Catholics, and Indigenous peoples. However, it also included the beliefs and practices of charismatic Christians pejoratively labeled "enthusiasts." For example, Reverend Francis Hutchinson cited the beliefs and practices of radical Protestants known as the French Prophets as pretended. In his book on this religious minority, he consistently defined charismatic Christian claims to spiritual power as enthusiasm, pretended, legerdemain, and juggling.23 The King George Witchcraft Act of 1735 ended diabolical witchcraft as a legal category in England and Scotland and made "pretended" the legal standard in Enlightenment England.24The King George Witchcraft Act of 1735 developed within a broader legal environment that had produced similar statutes throughout Europe.25 The first of these was the French Edict of 1692, which reclassified witchcraft into crimes like poisoning, sacrilege, and pretended powers. Notably, a similar law produced in the same environment defined Protestantism as a pretended religion and penalized Protestant leaders for advocating pretended religion.26 In colonial America, the state used anti-vagrancy legislation to control religious deviants like Jesuits, Quakers, and Enthusiasts by labeling them vagabonds and disorderly persons, then penalizing them for breaking vagrancy law.27Skeptical witchcraft legislation continued to be developed in the American colonies and then the United States into the nineteenth century.28 When New York drafted the 1813 disorderly person statute, it continued this trend by utilizing the language of early European witchcraft legislation. The relevant portion of the law addresses vagrancy and defines a disorderly person as "all jugglers [those who cheat or deceive by sleight of hand or tricks of extraordinary dexterity], and . . . all persons pretending to have skill in physiognomy, palmistry, or like crafty science, or pretending to tell fortunes, or to discover where lost goods may be found."29 This statute had much in common with the anti-vagrancy and pretended witchcraft legislation of the Anglophone world of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, a product of a larger legal environment that employed the King George Witchcraft Act of 1735 as a model.30 This model preemptively defined religious and spiritual unorthodoxy as pretended witchcraft, magic, or religion. By categorizing people's beliefs and practices as pretended this legislation allowed the state to discriminate against unorthodox spiritual traditions by deliberately conflating them with criminal deception.Legislation based on skeptical demonology continued in nineteenth-century England with the 1824 Act for the Punishment of Idle and Disorderly Persons, and Rogues and Vagabonds, in that Part of Great Britain called England.31 This act criminalized "every person pretending or professing to tell fortunes, or using any subtle Craft, Means, or Device, by Palmistry or otherwise, to deceive and impose."32 According to Owen Davies, the clause was "widely used in prosecuting rural cunning-folk."33 Throughout the British Empire and its former colonies, the government used anti-vagrancy legislation and skeptical witchcraft legislation to categorize people's genuine beliefs and religious practices as "pretended" as late as the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.34Besides Joseph Smith, only one other well-known example of disorderly person prosecution for treasure seeking in early America employs the word "pretended" to describe alleged supernatural gifts—the disorderly person charges against Dr. Luman Walters.35 Walters's case is only known due to newspaper articles discussing a documented case in New Hampshire.36 Because the notes from Luman Walters's trial are not available, it is impossible to explore how the court used "pretended" in disorderly person trials in the nineteenth century. But through Walters's alleged conviction in New York we can see how this legislation was used to penalize Walters for cunning-folk practices.37 Later allegations that Walters was a necromancer reveal the underlying religious bias which conflated cunning-folk with witches.38Although it is tempting to read "pretended" as fraud, there is reason to be cautious. According to Lynne Hume, in Anglophone witchcraft legislation "'pretends to exercise' means something else. The presumption is that people are not able to do these things and therefore whoever says they can is acting in a fraudulent manner."39 In previous generations, legal authorities and religious authorities superseded the cunning-folks' beliefs and practices by presuming that the cunning-folk were diabolical witches. After the Enlightenment, the same psychological process allowed Anglophone legal authorities to recategorize genuine belief and practices as pretended witchcraft. In both cases the legal system deliberately conflated unorthodox spiritual traditions with another crime to enable the policing of unorthodox spirituality. This tells us more about the beliefs of those in power than it does about the traditions these legal categories were designed to punish.Despite legal skepticism, belief in diabolical witchcraft continued into Joseph Smith's lifetime and beyond.40 The nineteenth-century repeal of Ireland's 1586 witchcraft statute inspired the publication of the anonymous pamphlet Antipas, which conflated Catholicism and Dissenters with witchcraft and urged Parliament to restrict both groups' religious activities. The pamphlet would have had a broad audience. As Andrew Sneddon has explained, "for the vast majority of those placed lower down the social ladder, especially those living in small, close-knit rural areas, the existence of the malefic witch continued to be regarded as a threat to their property and persons in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The same holds true for North America."41The diabolical witch doctrine still had its believers in Joseph Smith's early nineteenth-century environment, although the law no longer recognized diabolical witchcraft as a reality. Smith's critic Alexander Campbell argued for a synthesized demonology that allowed for pretended necromancy and diabolical necromancy to coexist as two different kinds of witchcraft.42 Campbell's use of necromancy charges in witchcraft allegations was a standard pattern within the Second Great Awakening.43 Likewise, treasure seeking became a primary target of witchcraft fear and belief during this period.44 People who feared cunning-folk, alleged false-prophets, Catholics, Atheists, non-white spiritual practices, and religious movements like the Quakers, the Shakers, and the Wilkensonians saw the practices they feared most as both pretended and diabolical, often describing these groups as practicing necromancy.45 In the early nineteenth-century environment of legal skepticism and the common suppressed belief that diabolical witches existed, one would expect to find the categories of pretended witchcraft and diabolical witchcraft used to label Joseph Smith's folk-Christian practices of treasure seeking in 1826 as well as charismatic expressions of Christian belief in 1830.When Joseph Smith, a young treasure seeker, had his first visionary experience, local religious leaders reacted negatively in ways that Smith family members considered surprising.46 At the age of fourteen, an unnamed assailant fired a bullet at Joseph Smith as he returned home.47 In 1823, Joseph Smith experienced an envisioned visitation of an angel, who declared that Smith would be a prophet and uncover a buried scripture. Within a year of this experience, rumors began to circulate that someone had disinterred and dissected his older brother Alvin's body.48 Dan Vogel and Michael Quinn believe that these were allegations of utilizing part of Alvin's body to acquire the golden plates. These rumors portrayed the act of acquiring the golden plates as a form of necromancy.49 These allegations may have been an initial, failed, attempt to charge Joseph Smith with a crime. As William Morain points out, "violating a grave" was "a felony offense for which, in 1824, he could have been incarcerated in the New York state prison for five years."50 A year later, in 1825, Josiah Stowell heard about Joseph Smith's gift for using his seer stone, perhaps tied to rumors of Joseph's 1823 vision of an angel who led him to the gold plates. Josiah Stowell requested that Joseph reside at his home as a farmworker who would aid Stowell in his treasure seeking. Joseph's parents agreed, perhaps to remove him from a dangerous environment. However, trouble followed Joseph Smith Jr. to Bainbridge, New York. In 1826, Stowell's nephew took Joseph Smith to court as a disorderly person.51Allegations of witchcraft continued after the trials as well, with some ascribed to Joseph's life in the 1820s. In 1834, testimonies ascribed to Smith's neighbors appeared in the anti-Mormon book Mormonism Unvailed.52 The affidavits in this book describe Smith's activities through the paradigms of pretended and diabolical witchcraft. In one of these affidavits, discussing a period between the 1826 and 1830 hearings, Sophia Lewis, who also served as Emma Smith's midwife, reported that Joseph and Emma's child died horribly deformed at birth. Her affidavit is notable because the diabolical witch's doctrine and folklore viewed deformed births and stillbirth as evidence of witchcraft.53 Shortly after Alvin's death, Emma Smith returned to her parents' Methodist church in Harmony. When Joseph Smith attempted to attend, it sparked a controversy that included church members' allegations of necromancy and other witchcraft practices. In the 1879 remembrances of these events, Emma's relatives made it clear that those involved in this controversy believed Joseph Smith "was a conjurer" and "a sorcerer," clarifying that these were forms of "witchcraft."54 This same Methodist congregation later threatened violence against Joseph Smith, which forced him to move to the home of Peter Whitmer Sr. in Fayette, New York.55Beginning in 1830, Joseph Smith's restorationism utilized the example of the Christian curses used by Old Testament Prophets, as well as Jesus and the Apostles in the New Testament. Joseph instructed his missionaries and followers to employ ritualized dusting of feet and clothing as a testament against those who persecuted them and rejected their message. This practice continued into the 1890s and would have provided ample material for those who believed that Joseph Smith and his followers were witches.56 Allegations of witchcraft continued in February 1831 with Alexander Campbell's publication of "Delusions," an anti-Mormon article in his periodical the Millennial Harbinger.57 In this article, Campbell uses familiar skeptical tropes and employs demonology to compare Joseph Smith and Mormonism with false prophecy, enthusiasm, and witchcraft. He directly compared Joseph Smith to Simon Magus and Elymas, the sorcerers of the Bible.58 Campbell leaves no room for equivocation: "I have never felt myself so fully authorized to address mortal man in the style in which Paul addressed Elymas the sorcerer as I feel towards this Atheist Smith."59 During the same year, mobs pursued Joseph Smith's followers as they left New York for Ohio.60 In 1832, Campbell's was as a In anti-witchcraft violence can be in the that Joseph Smith and in this Joseph Smith that these which he as a to their As a of a by Smith may have of Joseph Smith to Simon they Joseph Smith, the attempted to his to therefore or Joseph the it . . . us his They attempted to a of into his Joseph claimed that the not to but they would . . . All were and one man on and body with his like a Smith had to the from his to more The easily use of has In the nineteenth century, the was believed to be a means of a witch's powers and was a common of anti-witchcraft of witchcraft belief continued later into Joseph Smith's life. In 1834, the would the affidavits in his Mormonism This like a of skeptical and believers' describing Smith's alleged folk-Christian activities through the pretended and diabolical witchcraft As late as Smith of Campbell's continued witchcraft The year, Joseph Smith's last treasure ended with a that his to the more and of this For there are more than one for in this This treasure took in Salem, that the that had followed Smith to this in could be through a of early American witchcraft belief and In Smith's Joseph of to He claimed that Smith, the of had two who of when they the of the false and to their and are that they were not left to the power of the devil and Smith, to their with a crime so would appear that many of Smith's him of witchcraft and magic throughout his early life and to the by and there are three of in witchcraft The first and most of court and of The is These that the these often the beliefs and of the historians of witchcraft these by controlling for allegations of into these accounts by their The category are In Joseph Smith's 1826, and 1830 disorderly person only the court into the category of do not have the trial notes or sources, only of the used to the 1826 pretrial are known as the and the The only in articles to the pretrial The first of these articles appeared in with in and The is by William as a of his alleged as at the 1826 was in for the 1830 there are accounts by Joseph Smith, his and other a in witchcraft An additional related to the 1830 disorderly person cases is a ascribed to Justice of the George who oversaw the disorderly person of As with all sources, these accounts should be read events they describe may not took in They may also or of these As in all accounts of witch we must for the of in of Joseph Smith's alleged accounts of the 1826 disorderly person pretrial evidence that they into the larger pattern of In the there is evidence about Joseph his and his folk-Christian The Joseph Smith as a a for cunning-folk who compared to Old Testament The addresses the cunning-folk practice of utilizing seer also that these were Stowell and as believed As an the claims that Josiah Stowell's and two . . . or to of Joseph Smith's of his seer stones folk-Christian practices. claims that after a vision of a stone, Joseph Smith to find his seer stone, and the significant about how he the after he found This is when one the writings of a modern Dutch In his book on his folk-Christian practices, provided a for the of miraculous stones to God and for upon the This a larger pattern of Joseph Smith his other seer stones, as by This may be a of Joseph his first seer The also the powers within a folk-Christian that when Joseph had the stone, one of the of an an earlier of Joseph Smith's alleged as a seer as an According to this Joseph Smith Sr. his alleged gift and many of his finding hidden and stolen and that he that both he and his were that this power that God had so him should be used only in of or its in and with a he his to his was to this power. He that the of would some the of the and enable him to see testimonies of Smith's powers were a in the The was Josiah who the testimonies of Joseph Sr. and Joseph examples of the Joseph Smith's Stowell many other not to that Smith the he and many to his The then that Justice Stowell's belief in Joseph Smith's alleged as a treasure I believe says I believe it is not a of I it to be claims Joseph Smith his treasure that the treasure not be by by after with and they to the by These are a of the folk-Christian utilized by treasure of which Joseph Smith Sr. is believed to have According to both the and these were to a placed on the treasure by the person who buried When their attempts to acquire the treasure the at the folk-Christian for the treasure a against the devil over the of seeking from some five feet in had been without a of war against this of was and they that the of or of some mental was the of their between folk-Christian and for Joseph Smith's and depictions of these practices as When demonologists argue against of cunning-folk beliefs and practices, they described the common that practices were by the Christian would then attempt to by that folk-Christian practices were forms of false an with the For those who believed demonologists than evidence of folk-Christian was evidence of the is on this of the 1826 it Joseph Smith's seer use and treasure seeking, it does not a of power he ascribed these to that would us to compare his alleged practices to the In of these it Joseph Smith's and activities

Without doubt, in the 21st century, China eclipsed the West to become the African continent’s biggest trading partner. What however, is the antiquity and deep history of Sino-African trade and exchange relationships? Archaeological and historical evidence suggests that regions such as East Africa had over one thousand years of direct and indirect interaction with China (Casson 1989; Chaudhuri 1990; Chami 1998; La Violette 2008; Fleisher 2010; Kusimba 2016). Therefore, contrary to popular narratives in western historiography, China had been to Africa before Vasco da Gama. What is less emphasised in Eurocentric versions of the past is that between 1405 and 1433 during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) in Imperial China, Zheng He conducted imperial adventures that landed him in East Africa some time before Vasco da Gama (Abraham 2015; Dashu 2018; Kusimba 2018; Levathes 2014). In 1418 Zheng He commanded a giant fleet of more than 62 ships ferrying 37,000 soldiers across the Indian Ocean (Abraham 2015; Levathes 2014). Even before Zheng, historical evidence suggests that multi-directional contact had taken place between the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt, the Persian Gulf, Egypt, India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and various communities on the East African coast and the Indian Ocean Islands (Casson 1989; Chaudhuri 1985; Crowther et al. 2014; Hawley 2008). This set-in motion an earlier form of globalisation pivoted on the Indian Ocean rim, and where Europe featured little (Chirikure 2014, 2019).Consequently, pivoting the center of global history on Europe, as was previously the case is not only inappropriate but has stunted the flourishing of research into the deep history of connections that predate the dominance of Europe in other parts of the world. Not surprisingly, the last two or so decades have witnessed increased and successful attempts to re-write global history, away from a Eurocentric point of view to one that acknowledges the contribution of others, particularly those referred to as ‘people without history’ - the Indian Ocean rim region included (Wolf 1982; Scott 2009). As such, the continual growth in strength of Indian Ocean studies in Africa (e.g. Chittick 1974; Horton 1996; Kusimba 1994; 2016, 2018; Pwiti 2005; La Violette 2008), when examined using local lenses, in various participating regions offers nuanced histories that show globalization with Europe in the periphery. In fact, African connections with Europe (southwards of Angola) only started much later during the buildup to the Portuguese ‘voyages of discoveries’ to India.Recent work drawing from archaeology, archaeometry, linguistics and history continues to expose the deep history of connections between various areas within the Indian Ocean rim (Fleisher 2003; Crowther et al. 2014; Kusimba 2018). African plants, crops, and commodities ended up at different points in time in Asia, and vice versa. While the mechanics of the early history of circulations of ideas and commodities and nested biological exchanges are still being explored, from AD 700 onwards, historians and archaeologists have recorded intensified exchange relationships between the interior of southern Africa and the Swahili coast (eastern Africa) on the one hand and the wider Indian Ocean rim on the other (Curtin 1984; Chaudhuri 1985; Pwiti 2005; La Violette 2008). The Swahili coast stretches for nearly 3000 km from Mozambique in the south all the way up north, via Tanzania and Kenya to Somalia (Horton 1996; Chami 1998; Fleisher and La Violette 2005). Included in this space are the Indian Islands of Comoro and parts of Madagascar (Kusimba 2016). This coast was strategic space in the inter-continental Indian Ocean based maritime exchange in which commodities from hinterland southern Africa such as gold, iron, bark cloth, ivory, and slaves alongside those from the coast such as mangroves were traded and exchanged in return for cloth, glass beads, ceramics and among others incense (Pikirayi 2001, Fleisher and Wynie-Jones 2012; La Violette 2008). Within southern Africa, communities based at places such as Great Zimbabwe, Mapungubwe, Mapela, Bosutswe, Manyikeni and many others interacted and circulated commodities indirectly or directly with those at ports such as Chibuene, Sofala and Kilwa (Pwiti 2005; Sinclair et al. 2012; Chirikure 2014). Along the coast, the Swahili took advantage of predictable monsoon winds to have wider circulations of people, commodities and ideas linking Arabia, the Indian subcontinent, parts of Asia such as China and Africa (Chaudhuri 1990; Kusimba et al. 2013).While there is a general acceptance of the antiquity and deep history of the Indian Ocean based circulations system, the unanswered question still revolves around the antiquity and nature of southern Africa-China interactions. As a follow on, what was the nature of the connection and trade and exchange relationship? Was it direct or indirect? Within a framework availed by archaeological, archaeometric and historical evidence, this paper seeks to provide answers to these and other questions.

The period between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed trade and commerce through the overland and overseas routes. The ports in the western Indian Ocean had trading linkages with the ports in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. The Mughals and Safavids (who ruled Iran between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries) took proactive measures to promote trade and commerce in these regions. The rise of Surat on India’s western coast was synonymous with the emergence of ports such as Hormuz, Bandar Abbas and Basra. The arrival of European commercial enterprises in the Indian Ocean changed the established trade structure. The seventeenth century saw the emergence of Surat as one of the most important ports of the Mughal Empire, mainly because of its connectivity to the rich hinterland. It was also the terminal point of some essential overland routes towards the north-western part of India. The emergence of Surat was complemented by the arrival of merchant communities from different parts of the world. This led to deep trading linkages with ports such as Basra, Hormuz and Bandar Abbas. But during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the decline of Surat paved the way for Bombay on the western coast of India. Similarly, the decline of Bandar Abbas was succeeded by the rise of the port of Bushire in the Persian Gulf.

Reviewed by: Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c. 1750–1850 by Pedro Machado, and: Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism Across the Arabian Sea by Johan Mathew, and: Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780–1950 by Fahad Ahmad Bishara Sheetal Chhabria Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c. 1750–1850. By pedro machado. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 315 pp. $93.00 (hardcover); $28.00 (paper). Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism Across the Arabian Sea. By johan mathew. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016. 272 pp. $70.00 (hardcover); $29.95 (paper). Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780–1950. By fahad ahmad bishara. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 288 pp. $75.00 (hardcover); $38.72 (paper). Capitalism in Muddy Waters: The Indian Ocean Economy in the 19th century Scholars who undertake research on the Indian Ocean must foremost be commended for voyaging beyond the comfort of what are often nationally defined historiographical borders. Writing such histories requires piecing together sources from archives dispersed throughout imperial, state, and private collections and across regions of cultural and linguistic difference and assembling these into a single historical narrative. Dating as early as the second century b.c.e., flows across the South China Sea through the Western Indian Ocean began Indian Ocean history. For centuries thereafter, which ports were dominant around the Indian Ocean littoral shifted. Commerce combined with or escaped regional rulers' ambitions; rulers were either keen to promote or suppress oceanic traffic. By the nineteenth century in Indian Ocean history, traders and their historians alike had to contend with imperial infrastructures that coordinated and lent power to European capital. Three recent publications on Indian Ocean history expertly circumvent nationalist and imperial historiographies and challenge the singular power of European capital. By foregrounding trade in the Western Indian Ocean in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries these books challenge the narrative of decline under the pressure of colonialism. They show how Indian, African, and Arab merchants shaped infrastructures and outcomes of empire and capitalism. They historicize exchanges amidst the pressures of new colonial legal regimes and the influx of novel currencies and commodities. They clearly [End Page 306] demonstrate that even if some trades became less legible and even illicit, such exchanges persisted much longer than previously thought, forcing a rich historiography on the Indian Ocean to overcome its focus on the early modern era. Together these books diversify histories of capitalism by seeing the formation of markets, merchant networks, and legal regimes from outside a North Atlantic perspective. Pedro Machado's Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c. 1750–1850 (2014) examines the central role of Gujarat's Vaaniya merchants between Western India and East Africa. Machado demonstrates not only that the Portuguese imperial infrastructures were dependent on Gujarati merchants but also that Gujarati actions determined European outcomes. Johan Mathew's Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism Across the Arabian Sea (2016) hones in on the question of how certain trades and networks were relegated to the margins of what counted as the "market." Focusing on the traffic in slaves, weapons, and currency, Mathew argues that these commodities were "framed out" of the market, masking their role in colonial capitalism. Fahad Ahmad Bishara's Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780–1950 (2017) strives to circumvent the imperial lens through which histories of the Indian Ocean have often been written, without resorting to a narrative of disparate networks operating alongside one another. Focusing on waraqas, or deeds that record obligations and debts between merchants and financiers, producers and consumers, or even sultans and commercial agents, Bishara shows how law provided a structure that made oceanic flows possible. Machado's Ocean of Trade manages "the larger history of global exchange" in the nineteenth century by exposing and "being attentive to the multiple strands that underlie its structure" (p. 14). He focuses on the activities of Vaaniya or Gujarati merchants as central mediators forging a connection between Mozambique and India between 1750 and 1850...

Café Space, Communication, Creativity, and Materialism

Reviewed by: Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism, Commerce and Islam Ethan R. Sanders Sheriff, Abdul. 2010. Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism, Commerce and Islam. London: C. Hurst & Company. 351pp. £18.99 (paper). In this study, Abdul Sheriff, a prominent scholar of the economic and cultural history of Zanzibar, and the director of the Zanzibar Indian Ocean Research Institute, has broadened his scope to deliver a much-anticipated and welcome study of the western Indian Ocean world. He has chosen to take a longue durée view, seeking to examine the great movements and not moments of the western Indian Ocean from the first century C.E. until around 1500, just after the intrusion of the Portuguese. Drawing on several intellectual currents of maritime and Indian Ocean scholarship, the strength of the book lies in his ability to collect these themes and fashion them together in a single, highly readable account. The breadth of the research is impressive, as he has not only worked through archives on multiple continents and in several ports around the edge of the Indian Ocean, but utilized a vast array of travelers' narratives, which include Indian, Chinese, Iranian, and Arab sources, and not merely the better-known accounts of Ibn Battuta and other Europeans. Sheriff's breadth is complemented by his innovative use of the dhow as his lens of examination, and he shows how these boats were not merely transporters of goods, but the means of social interaction, which gave birth to cosmopolitan cultures wherever they went. A central theme of the work follows Michael Perason's argument that the period before 1500 was a time when the western Indian Ocean was a mare liberum, or free sea, when trade was not controlled by states and was largely unrestricted. The freedom to trade and follow the monsoon winds created a diverse trading web, connecting the littoral peoples of the region. Sheriff is careful to point out that these maritime societies had a "dual nature": they were not purely land based, nor did they look solely to the sea; they had strong economic and cultural links with the interior peoples, but they also had significant connections, through kinship, religion, and trade, to other cultures across the ocean. Here, Sheriff is inserting a poignant argument into a long-running, but still politically salient, debate in Zanzibar and elsewhere, as to whether the littoral peoples have stronger cultural and ethnic ties to Africa or Asia. He carefully navigates this issue by highlighting the almost symbiotic relationship between the mainland and the maritime worlds of the Swahili people of the East African coast. Following two exploratory and introductory chapters, the text is broken up into four parts. The first describes the geography, cultures, and trade of the three main ecological zones of the western Indian Ocean: the Swahili Coast, the Intermediate Desert Zone (northeastern Africa and the Horn, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Persian Gulf region), and the western Indian seaboard—though the account occasionally forays into the eastern Indian Ocean as well. The second part of the book contains two chapters on dhows and navigation. Sheriff explains that the term dhow is an overarching category, which includes many different kinds of vessels, and even though [End Page 133] the triangular lateen sail was a defining characteristic, there were several other types. He emphasizes that throughout history, these boats adapted to the technological advances and economic needs of the Indian Ocean. He provides a fascinating discussion on the navigational methods invented and incorporated in the Indian Ocean world and paints a vivid picture of what life was like for the dhow crews. The third section moves more chronologically, starting with the early Roman period and then going through the rise of the Sasanian Empire and its most important port city in the Persian Gulf, Siraf. This period was succeeded by a time when the southern Arabian coast exerted the greatest influence, which was followed by the golden age of the Indian Ocean city-states such as Kilwa, Calicut, and Malacca. After these chronological chapters, Sheriff diverges into a helpful discussion on the Indian Ocean connections of the island of Madagascar, which until more recently has...