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Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism, Commerce, and Islam. By abdul sheriff. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. 384 pp. $50.00 (cloth).
The book under review is the third in a row that I have recently read on the Indian Ocean world. This is not a mere coincidence that all of them have coastal southern/eastern Africa as one of their main foci; this is indicative of growing scholarly interest in the aspects of culture and commerce of the Indian Ocean in general and of coastal eastern Africa in particular. One does not fail to notice that the authors of these books endeavored, in one way or another, to study coastal or even continental Africa within the framework of the Indian Ocean. By so doing, they not only significantly contribute to the existing literature but also offer new perspectives to study the Indian Ocean world. Abdul Sheriff's Dhow Cultures is a study of commercial exchanges and concomitant sociocultural interactions in the western Indian Ocean from the longue durée perspective. Although the book is based almost entirely on published sources well known to scholars, it is provocative and questions some of the major interpretations and established views on the history of the Indian Ocean world.
The book consists of fifteen chapters. In the first two chapters, which together serve as an introduction, the author outlines the key issues and interpretations involved in the study of the Indian Ocean world, highlights the strengths and weaknesses of some major studies done in the past, and provides the context in which the author examines the maritime culture of the western Indian Ocean. Here, the author talks about how the regular and alternating monsoon winds, a characteristic of the Indian Ocean, determined the structure and flow of maritime trade. A major concern of the author has been the historiographical peripheralization of the East African Coast in the study of the Indian Ocean world. Past studies, the author claims, have accorded only a marginal space to coastal East Africa. A good deal of the narrative in the Dhow Cultures is, therefore, devoted to this segment of the ocean....