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Over the past two decades, historians have reinterpreted the commercialization of nineteenth-century East Africa by demonstrating how the region's cultural institutions actively shaped the penetration of global capital, mainly through analyses of the consumption, distribution, and localized meanings of imported commodities. Stephen Rockel's study of Nyamwezi porters - in many ways the epitomizing actors of nineteenth-century commercialization - examines how caravan workers shaped this economic transformation by creating robust 'crew cultures' that embraced wage-labor opportunities but also defended worker interests by invoking rights of custom. Infant East African capitalism had to rely heavily on mature porterage systems. The free wage labor of these caravan workers, Rockel argues, thus represented 'an alternative modernity counterposed and integrated to European capitalist modernity, a translated wage-labor system representing a translated modernity' (p. 10).
Much of the book's introduction is devoted to demonstrating that nineteenth-century porterage was overwhelmingly the work of free laborers, with slaves and slavery having little to do with it. For reasons of wider ideology and narrow politics, European accounts habitually misrepresent this fact by drawing a tight connection between porterage and slave labor, thus laying the groundwork to justify the regulation and eventual dismemberment of caravan work through abolitionist appeals. Rockel considers this knot of misrepresentation and misconception the product of 'post-Enlightenment philosophy', and draws upon a mixture of subaltern studies and transnational labor historians to find alternative conceptual paths to recover the history of Nyamwezi porterage. Marcus Rediker's work on eighteenth-century merchant seamen1 looms largest among these influences, providing Rockel not only with terminology ('crew cultures') but also a comparative model wherein...