Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the ‘Early Modern’: Historiographical Conventions and Problems

Abstract

European-inspired scholarship underscores conventional academic consensus that African commercial entrepeneurship disappeared with the European voyages of discovery, and subsequent implantation of the Potuguese, Dutch, English, and French commercial empires. Thus the people of eastern Africa are portrayed largely as technologically backward and isolated from the main currents of global history from about 1500 until the onset of modern European colonialism from the close of the nineteenth century. This article argues that the conventional view needs to be challenged, and that Eastern African history in the period 1500-1800 needs to be revised in the context of an Indian Ocean world economy.