Jonathan Miran. Red Sea Citizens: Cosmopolitan Society and Cultural Change in Massawa
128 ISLAMIC AFRICA Jonathan Miran. Red Sea Citizens: Cosmopolitan Society and Cultural Change in Massawa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. 394 pp.; glossary, bibliography, index, 5 maps, and 35 black- and- white photographs. $27.95. It has never been easy for specialists to situate Northeast Africa in broad terms or the longue durée. Astride the academic fault line between Africa and Middle East area studies, the fi eld has for some time been partitioned by contemporary national politics, sectarianism, and orientalist legacies, leaving many scholars ambivalent towards synthetic or long- term anal- ysis.1 In recent years, however, a number of historians have developed new approaches to the fi eld: some have turned away from the study of states and ethnicities to engage questions raised by urban or colonial his- torians elsewhere in Africa and Asia, while others have reconceptualized the defi nition and boundaries of the region itself, as with the recent inter- est in Sudanic and Nile Valley history. To these projects we can now add Jonathan Miran’s provocative new book, a wide- ranging study of how de- velopments in the Red Sea arena fostered social, economic, and political change in nineteenth- and early twentieth- century Massawa, a predomi- nantly Muslim port city in present- day Eritrea. It is a nuanced and refresh- ing look at the links between the local and the global in Northeast Africa. After an introduction outlining the author’s main themes and sources, the fi rst two chapters of the book situate the Eritrean coast within a range of regional and interregional systems.
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