Sourcing and shipping museum objects from East Africa to the Smithsonian, 1887–1891

Abstract

This article presents new research on the sourcing and shipping of museum objects from the Kilimanjaro Region, located in present-day Tanzania, to the Smithsonian Institution, located in Washington, DC. Through analysis of the personal letters of Smithsonian naturalist William Louis Abbott, who relied on protection from one particularly powerful leader in Kilimanjaro, Mangi Mandara, the article argues that the co-existence of formal economic exchange and informal gift-exchange were very much integral to the late nineteenth-century the late nineteenth-century East African transcontinental and maritime economy–even as this transcontinental trade was shifting from trans-Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea orientations toward Anglo-German and American ports, albeit briefly.