Coastal East Africa and the Western Indian Ocean: Long-Distance Trade, Empire, Migration, and Regional Unity, 1750-1970

IN RECENT YEARS there has been a growing awareness that the disciplinary boundaries of traditional area studies often do as much to obscure the contemporary world as they do to illuminate it. In a world where Indians, Pakistanis, and Koreans might work in the Persian Gulf or Silicon Valley, where North Americans run cafes in Katmandu, where Nigerian immigrants live in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Persian Gulf, where Dearborn, Michigan is home to thousands of Yemenis, and all of these people live in a world awash with transnational flows of culture and trade, making sense out of one part of the world without reference to others seems increasingly quixotic. As a result, people who teach and do research on the contemporary world have been at the forefront of rethinking the geographical or spatial units of analysis they use. Historians have been slower to move away from this old analytical framework because, at first glance anyway, the boundaries used in area studies seemed to make sense in the past, even if they have shortcomings in the present. Historians have, nevertheless, used area studies boundaries in several ways. First, much of the historical work done on the non-western world is done by people who are trained in area studies, teach in area studies, and