The World of the Swahili: An African Mercantile Civilization

By John Middleton

Book Overview

The Swahili of East Africa have a long and distinctive history as a literate, Muslim, urban, and mercantile society. In this book a leading Africanist presents the first full-length anthropological account of the Swahili and offers an original analysis of their little-understood and unusual culture. Swahili towns, some urban with elegant stone buildings and others more rural with palm-leaf-matting houses, are spread along the thousand-mile East African coast. Because each local community is culturally different from its neighbors, previous historians and anthropologists have viewed the Swahili as a series of isolated and 'detribalized' groups. John Middleton argues, on the contrary, that beneath the cultural variation is a single structure, that of a well-defined and complex trading society that has shown little change through the ages. Drawing on his own field research and on earlier writings on the Swahili, Middleton describes this centuries-old mercantile culture-its local and descent groupings, marriage patterns, religion, and values. He traces the history of their colonized past as subjects to Arabs, Portuguese, British, and others and shows that, although their economic and political role has continually been a subordinate one, their sense of their unique identity enables them to persist as an ongoing civilization.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300060807
• ISBN13: 9780300060805
• Release Date: September 1994
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 266 Pages
• Weight: 0.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Detailed documentation of Swahili culture

"The World of the Swahili" by anthropology professor John Middleton is a very detailed description of Swahili culture. The book covers the basic anthropology subjects: courtship and marriage, family, politics, land tenure, home ownership, and so on. The Swahili culture is complex and somewhat difficult to define; there has never really been a Swahili nation-state, and many of the people who live in Swahili cities are not recognized as Swahili. Middleton writes from his own long experience of East Africa (he is the author of several books) as well as bibliographic research. This text is aimed at the reader with some experience in anthropology or East Africa.