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 analysis.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 historians 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 developments 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. Chapter 1 explores the history of Massawa before the nineteenth century, focusing fi rst on the emergence of local power brokers in the early Ottoman period and then on the decline of their political autonomy in the nineteenth century as Ottoman indirect rule yielded to open competition among Egyptians, Italians, and Ethiopi- ans. Chapter 2 sets these developments against the backdrop of a larger Brau delian conjuncture in the Red Sea arena: Miran argues here that commercial and imperial developments in the nineteenth century trans- formed Massawa from an entrepôt to a shipping emporium that linked the 1 Notable exceptions include Donald Crummey, Land and Society in the Christian King- dom of Ethiopia: From the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Jay Spaulding, The Heroic Age in Sinnar (East Lansing: Michigan State University, 1985); James McCann, People of the Plow: An Agricultural History of Ethiopia, 1800–1990 (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1995); and Teshale Tibebu, The Making of Modern Ethiopia, 1896–1974 (Lawrenceville, N.J.: Red Sea Press, 1995). BOOK REVIEWS 129 Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean to the regional economy. The next three chapters explore the impact of these trends on the port and its envi- rons. Chapter 3 illustrates how the growing Hadrami and Egyptian presence in Massawa led to the emergence of a new group of merchants who made their fortunes by mediating between the coast and hinterland. Chapter 4 explores how Islamic culture bound these communities together and defi ned Massawa as an urban space, and chapter 5 examines a cohort of urban no- tables who exemplify these various developments. In many respects, these fi nal chapters represent the crux of the author’s arguments—it is here that we see how life in cosmopolitan Massawa often turned upon “the aspiration to create unity in a context of social diversity” (6). A conclusion summa- rizes the arguments and briefl y surveys twentieth- century developments. There is much here that will fascinate the specialist. Miran’s wide- ranging discussion of the Islamic institutions and networks of the coast represents a major contribution to the literature, particularly since he links them to revival movements in the wider Muslim world. The analysis of the growth of the local Khatmiyya and ‘Ad Shaykh groups is especially rich, and the discussion of their relationship with the Italian authorities is fascinating—it would seem that the Muslims of colonial Massawa oc- casionally resembled their counterparts in the Sudan or northern Nigeria in that they could obtain limited forms of autonomy that were denied to other groups. Most of the oral testimonies, local Arabic histories, and qâḍî court records that inform this discussion are previously untapped sources. Equally penetrating is the author’s rich analysis of the regional economy: his detailed discussion of pearl diving documents the range of local and extra- local actors (African divers, Arabian captains, Hadrami and Indian fi nanciers, and European consumers) to great effect, as does his compari- son of Massawans’ involvement in the regional caravan routes and slave trade, though he readily admits the tentative nature of his fi ndings on the last subject on account of the available sources. Yet as much as Miran deepens our understanding of these ostensibly local topics, his major contribution lies in the links he draws with much larger historical processes. On the one hand, he has introduced a frame- work for thinking about the integration of Northeast Africa into the larger Indian Ocean arena in the modern period, and the analysis is greatly en- riched by recent scholarship in that fi eld. For example, his discussion of brokerage systems and port- hinterland relations is driven by comparisons with the East African coast, and his account of the Hadrami diasporic presence in Massawa is informed by the growing literature on that topic. Yet on .

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