The progressive integration of eastern Africa into an Afro-Eurasian world-system, first–fifteenth centuries ce

Abstract

Long-distance trade, along with the exchange of knowledge, beliefs and values, has always been a crucial factor for social change. At the beginning of the Common Era, the occurrence of regular and significant exchanges and interconnections between maritime and terrestrial routes combined to build what can be considered as the first world-system. Although eastern Africa has long been connected to an Indian Ocean sphere of interaction, sustained participation in networks of trade is found first in the pre-Swahili period, within the context of the incipient Afro-Eurasian world-system that formed in the first century ce. There is archaeological evidence for the existence of various sites predating the Islamic period. The world-system was affected by climatic changes, famines and epidemics during parts of the fifth and sixth centuries. Starting in the late tenth century, the expansion of the system was bolstered by a global warming during the eleventh–twelfth centuries, accompanied by a strengthening of the monsoon patterns in the Indian Ocean.