Description
Book SynopsisIn Port Cities and Intruders, historian Michael Pearson explores the role of port cities and their orientation, relations between the coast and the interior, the place of the coast in the world economy, and the impact of the Portuguese in the early modern period.
Trade ReviewMichael Pearson... provides us with a fascinating collection of anecdotes, data, and quotations. We travel with him through a range of debates about world systems, littoral societies, [and] the meaning of world history. Times Literary Supplement A deeply researched, attractively presented, and question-raising book. Choice Pearson, a distinguished scholar of South Asia and Portuguese expansion, boldly takes on the complex history of coastal East Africa during an especially dramatic period that witnessed the coming together of two major pre-modern world systems. -- Edward A. Alpers Historian Michael Pearson has put together an imaginative and yet solidly grounded book about the east African coast extending for 1,500 miles from Mogadish to Delagoa Bay. -- Colin Simmons English Historical Review This book is valuable, well written, and clearly argued, with a refreshing sense of excitement at new interpretations... [It is] a pleasure to read for both its content and its style, and his elegantly argued and wide view of the trading system of the Afrasiatic Sea. -- John Middleton Journal of World History This intellectually stimulating and thought-provoking publication is recommended as essential reading for historians, anthropologists, and all those interested in the history of social, economic, and political formations in the Indian Ocean basin and the Swahili world. -- Mohamed Ahmed Saleh International Journal of African Historical Studies
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
Chapter 1. Introduction: Locating Coastal East Africa
Chapter 2. The Swahili Coast in the Afrasian Sea
Chapter 3. The Swahili Coast and the Interior
Chapter 4. East Africa in the World-Economy
Chapter 5. The Portuguese on the Coast
Chapter 6. Conclusion
Notes
Index
