Inland from Mombasa

Over the past few decades, scholars have traced how Indian Ocean merchants forged transregional networks into a world of global connections. East Africa’s crucial role in this Indian Ocean world has primarily been understood through the influence of coastal trading centers like Mombasa. In Inland from Mombasa, David P. Bresnahan looks anew at this Swahili port city from the vantage point of the communities that lived on its rural edges. By reconstructing the deep history of these Mijikenda-speaking societies over the past two millennia, he shows how profoundly they influenced global trade even as they rejected many of the cosmopolitan practices that historians have claimed are critical to creating global connections. Bresnahan makes the compelling case that the seemingly isolating alternative social pursuits engaged in by Mijikenda speakers were in fact key to their active role in global commerce and politics.

“This is exemplary scholarship that recenters the Indian Ocean world on the African continent. By reconstructing the deep history of Mijikenda societies, David Bresnahan demonstrates how the decisions they made about their own lives affected power relations across the Arabian Sea and beyond.” — Rhiannon Stephens, author of Poverty and Wealth in East Africa: A Conceptual History

“An enlightening, urgent, and refreshing intervention. This book provides a critically important perspective on Mombasa from its surrounding communities and, in the process, a genre-defining reconceptualization of the essential role of inland societies that chose not to be centralized in the process of globalization and trade across the Indian Ocean.” — Bettina Ng’weno, Associate Professor of African American and African Studies, University of California, Davis

David P. Bresnahan is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Utah.