Indian Ocean but not African Sea: The Erasure of East African Commerce from History

Author(s): Chandra Richard De Silva

Source: Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 29, No. 5, Special Issue: Political Strategies of
Democracy and Health Issues and Concerns in Global Africa (May, 1999), pp. 684-694
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2645859
Accessed: 16-02-2017 08:38 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

Sage Publications, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of
Black Studies

This content downloaded from 95.183.200.251 on Thu, 16 Feb 2017 08:38:41 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 INDIAN OCEAN BUT NOT
AFRICAN SEA
The Erasure of East African
Commerce From History

CHANDRA RICHARD DE SILVA

Old Dominion University

The first of the three connected propositions presented in this arti-

cle is that the East African achievement in seaborne trade and com-
merce during the 15th and 16th centuries was originally devalued
because of lack of knowledge by European commentators. The sec-
ond is that the basis of the continuing devaluation of East African
trade derives from European notions about the Muslim and African
"other" developed in medieval times and during the Portuguese
voyages of discovery in the 15th century. Finally, this virtual era-
sure of the East African achievement continued by generations of
Eurocentric historians is symbolized by the use of the term Indian
Ocean not just for the seas that wash the littoral of the Indian sub-
continent, but for the African Sea that stretches from the southern-
most point of Africa along the East coast to the Red Sea.
The Portuguese, as is well known, had fought the Muslim con-
querors of the Iberian peninsula since the ninth century A.D.
Indeed, the very definition of the Portuguese identity was linked to
the difference between them and their Muslim "other." To the Por-
tuguese, all Muslims in the Magrib and in Iberia, whether they were
Arabs or Berbers, were Mouros or Moors, the first Islamic ethnic
category they created and hence knew. Whereas it is often argued
that wars of Christian reconquest of the Iberian peninsula increased
religious fanaticism among both Muslims and Christians, it is not
often kept in mind that the 15th and 16th centuries were also periods
when intense and brutal conflicts between Christians and Muslims

JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES, Vol. 29 No. 5, May 1999 684-694

C) 1999 Sage Publications, Inc.

684

This content downloaded from 95.183.200.251 on Thu, 16 Feb 2017 08:38:41 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 De Silva / ERASURE OF EAST AFRICAN COMMERCE 685

occurred in North Africa.' It would be simplistic to de

conflicts simply as wars of religious conquest. The Portuguese hold
over Safi (conquered in 1508) and Azemmour (seized in 1514) in
Morocco, as well as the early 16th century Spanish dominance over
Oran, depended on cooperation and alliances with local Islamic
groups. The Muslim "other," although regarded as the enemy, was
recognized as powerful even after Muslims were expelled from the
Iberian peninsula. This was partly because of the expansion of
Ottoman rule over North Africa with the conquest of Egypt in 1517
and the seizure of the Spanish fort at Algiers in 1529 by Turkish
corsairs. The Muslims were also recognized as sophisticated mer-
chants who came from flourishing cities. This was an "other" that
was not necessarily inferior and indeed might be superior in some
respects.
On the other hand, during the 15th century the Portuguese devel-
oped a negative concept of Africans. This concept was also implicit
in medieval Europe. As John Friedman (1994) pointed out,

In a somewhat less documented way, Africa has had much the same
function as a repository for and home of the cultural others, and even
the most superficial acquaintance with medieval world maps which
show peoples, will indicate that Africa and India are the chief homes
of monstrous races of men, cannibals, mannish women and other
aberrant species. (p. 66)

But the idea was substantially strengthened and popularized by

Portuguese activities in the 15th century. The Portuguese explorers
of the 1470s found that the inhabitants of the Guinea coast and of
Central Africa were not Muslims and were, unlike the Muslims of
the Maghrib, darker in color. The significance of skin color is
apparent in the word the Portuguese used to describe these Afri-
cans: negro/negra (Black man/woman). They built on existing
negative European stereotypes to assume that these Black, non-
Christian people were inferior and needed to be civilized. Their fac-
ile assumptions were aided by the fact that the states of the West
African coast, except for Benin, were small and weak.2 They were
certainly less powerful and less organized than the great inland
African empire of Songhay.3 The idea that Black Africans could be

This content downloaded from 95.183.200.251 on Thu, 16 Feb 2017 08:38:41 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
686 JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES / MAY 1999

satisfied with trinkets was related to the economic relations

between west-central Africa and the Portuguese, relations that
became increasingly dominated by the slave trade as the 16th cen-
tury wore on. It enabled the Portuguese to justify the depredations
of slave traders in the kingdom of the Kongo despite the efforts of
its rulers.4 The marginalization of the people of Africa was thus
related to their consignment to the periphery of the newly expand-
ing European world economy. Antonio de Silveira echoed this idea
sometime later when he wrote to the King of Portugal from his East
African post in Sofala: "Cloth and beads are to the Kaffirs what
pepper is to Flanders and corn is to us because they cannot live
without this merchandise and lay up their treasures because of it"
(Documents on the Portuguese, 1966, p. 563).
When the Portuguese eventually sailed around the coast of
Africa and came to its eastern coast, they found a very different
situation. The East African coast was studded by a string of thriving
port-cities. The commerce of these cities connected East Africa
with West, South and Southeast Asia. The description of Mombasa
by Duarte Barbosa (1550/1918) in the early 16th century explains
why the Portuguese were impressed.

[Mombasa is] a very fair place with lofty stone and mortar houses
well aligned with streets.... This is a place of great traffic and has a
good harbor in which are always moored craft of many kinds and
also great ships which come from Cofala [Sofala] and those which
go thither and others which come from the great kingdom of Cam-
baya [Gujerat in India] and from Meylinde [Malindi]: others which
sail to the isles of Zanzibar yet others of which I will speak of anon.
(pp. 19-21)

Mombasa was only one of many trading city-states in the area,

but it was one of the more important centers and was clearly becom-
ing stronger as the Portuguese arrived in the 16th century. As a
result, it embarked on a long war of resistance and was thrice plun-
dered by the Portuguese (in 1507, 1528. and 1589) before it fell and
became the site of a Portuguese fort that endures to this day.
Another major East African port was Malindi, whose ruler, appar-
ently fearing the power of Mombasa, became one of the early allies

This content downloaded from 95.183.200.251 on Thu, 16 Feb 2017 08:38:41 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 De Silva I ERASURE OF EAST AFRICAN COMMERCE 687

of the Portuguese in the region. Pate, north of Malindi, was also a

flourishing port whereas Kilwa controlled the gold trade flowing
along the Zambezi valley through its command of the port of
Sofala. Mogadishu, Brava, and Kismayu on the Somali coast, the
island of Zanzibar, were also important trading centers.
When the Portuguese arrived in these ports, they found that the
rulers and traders of these city-states were Muslims. They were
dressed like the Muslims the Portuguese knew in North Africa. A
document in the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, has the following
description of these traders:

From waist down they cover themselves with cotton and silk cloths
and carry other silk cloths thrown under their arms in the manner of
cloaks and their turbans on their heads and some of them wear little
hoods of a quarter of a grain cloth, others narrow woolen cloth of
many colors and of camlet and other silks.5

Given the prejudices that they arrived with, the Portuguese read-
ily believed that these port-cities were the creation of Muslims
rather than Africans. They thus drew a clear distinction between the
Muslim traders who they called the Mouros, and the non-Muslim
people of the interior or the Kaffirs. It was not that the Portuguese
had a favorable opinion of these Mouros. They were always
regarded as a potential enemy. The Journal of the First Voyage of
Vasco da Gama records that when the Portuguese first reached
Mozambique they were well received, but as the author reports,
"when they learnt that we were Christians they arranged to seize us
and kill us by treachery" (Ravenstein, 1898, p. 28; see also Cidade,
1945, p. 143). In fact, Pedro Alvares Cabral, the Portuguese com-
mander of the large fleet that was sent to the East in 1500, was given
the following instructions :6

If you encounter ships belonging to the aforesaid Moors of Mecca at

sea, you must endeavor as much as you can to take possession of
them, and of their merchandise and property and also of the Moors
who are in the ships, to your profit as best you can and to make war
on them and do them as much damage as possible as a people with
whom we have so great and so ancient an enmity. (Cabral, trans.
1938, p. 180)

This content downloaded from 95.183.200.251 on Thu, 16 Feb 2017 08:38:41 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
688 JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES / MAY 1999

On the other hand, the Portuguese saw the Muslim city-states as

part of the Islamic World rather than of Africa. This tendency to
deny Africans of some of their achievements continued when the
Portuguese established a maritime empire in the East ruled from
Goa in India. Their empire in the East was now Asia Portuguesa
(Portuguese Asia) and it included not only the forts and trading
posts on the China Sea, the East Indies, and South Asia, but also all
the Portuguese forts and trading posts on the East African coast.
Indeed, the official name of the Portuguese empire in the East was
the Estado da India (State of India).
We should not underestimate the extent to which the construc-
tion of mental maps was influenced by the extensive literature pro-
duced by Europe on the non-European world. This was the age of
printing, but the novel had yet to evolve. It was, therefore, a time
when travel and missionary literature was the rage. European
knowledge of the geography of the world was undergoing many
changes, but in the map of the European mind, Africa was increas-
ingly defined as the undeveloped region between the Guinea coast
and the Limpopo river, the land of negros, a source of slaves, gold,
and ivory and a region to which you could sell cheap cloth, beads,
trinkets, and later, guns, at great profit. They could not conceive that
the developed cities of East Africa could have been built by Afri-
cans. Remnants of this attitude exist even among historians who
have worked long and hard to extol African achievements. For
example, Neville Chittick writes in The Cambridge History of
Africa (1977) that "The people of the cities of the [East African]
coast evolved a society and a culture which in many ways was pecu-
liar to themselves and which we may term a Swahili civilization:
to the heart of Africa, however, this civilization contributed lit-
tle" (p. 219).
Some historians, relying on cursory readings of Portuguese Ara-
bic or Swahili documents, assumed that the city-states and trading
empires of East Africa were Arab or Persian (e.g., see Heepe,
1928). This idea is partly derived from the tradition that many of the
dynastic rulers of these cities claimed to be Shirazis, tracing their
origin to the city of Shiraz in Persia. It was supplemented by the
theory first put forward by Strandes (1961) at the end of the 19th

This content downloaded from 95.183.200.251 on Thu, 16 Feb 2017 08:38:41 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 De Silva / ERASURE OF EAST AFRICAN COMMERCE 689

century that the creative energy of these states came from the out-
siders. Somewhere in the background there was also the assump-
tion that these traders were from Arabia rather than North Africa
and were thus not African. The old assumption in many of the Por-
tuguese chronicles that trade in the region was controlled by for-
eign Muslims and not local Africans has died hard.
However, the work of a number of historians in the last three dec-
ades has made it abundantly clear that a very large proportion of
those who wore Arab clothing and converted to Islam were descen-
dants of intermarriages between local inhabitants and Arab traders.
We can find support for this in Portuguese documents as well. One
such document records that "These Moors of Sofala are black men,
some olive, and use the tongue of the land which is that of the gen-
tiles."7 The Swahili version of the Kilwa Chronicle gives at least
one instance of the sultan marrying the daughter of a local chieftain.
Even more important is the growing realization that these so-called
city-states were linked to the surrounding countryside by a system
of political alliances and economic ties. The rulers of Mombasa had
allies in the Miji Kenda groups (Oliver, 1977, p. 210). Malindi in
the late 16th century was allied with the Segeju. Traders from these
cities did not always wait for goods to be brought to them. They sent
agents inland and sometimes ventured out of the city in person. Nor
did the foreign element completely dominate the seaborne trade.
References to African seamen are rare, but they do exist.
The activities of these African merchants did not end with Portu-
guese dominance over the high seas. Duarte de Lemos lamented in
a letter to the King of Portugal dated July 30, 1508, that

while the Moors of Angoxe [Comoro Islands] and some of the oth-
ers along this coast from here to Sofala stay here everything is
damned and there are two or three of them here in Mogambique who
do little good to Your Highness's service if they are to stay for they
are merchants and trade secretly with those of Angoche, despite
every diligence made by Your Highness's officials because your
captains and their people bring cloth to these parts and the Moors
collect them secretly for four chickens [i.e., a small bribe] and send
them from here to Angoche through the same Moors of Angoche
who bring supplies here and from there they trade with Sofala.
(Documents on the Portuguese, II, 1963, p. 297)

This content downloaded from 95.183.200.251 on Thu, 16 Feb 2017 08:38:41 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
690 JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES / MAY 1999

Obviously, some African traders were seeking survival through

ostensible collaboration. Five years later, Pero Vaz Soares wrote to
the king in the same vein and pointed out that the Moors make a
good profit by trading in ivory and gold with the kingdom of
Mwene Mutapa (Documents on the Portuguese, III, 1964, pp. 465-
467).8 Less than 1 year later, Affonso de Albuquerque, the Portu-
guese governor, complained to the King that "Regarding Sofala and
Mocambique it seems to me that the trade and profit of Sofala goes
very slowly and that the substance and gain is all of the Moors of
the fortress" (Documents on the Portuguese, II, 1964, p. 559).
Throughout the period of the so-called Portuguese dominance over
the East African coast, they certainly controlled less than half and
perhaps as little as one eighth of the gold exports from the region
(see Lobato, 1954-1960). African traders, like the Asians, were
hurt but not eliminated by the first wave of European colonialism.
Let us turn now to the third of the propositions advocated by this
article. This is the argument that the concept of the Indian Ocean
has diverted attention away from the flourishing trading patterns
that had been developed by Africans on the East coast of Africa.
Once again we have to start with the Portuguese and to emphasize
that their primary objective in exploring the African coast after the
1470s was not to establish more trading connections with Africans
but to reach India and China, the fabled sources of spices and silk.
To be sure, there was some hope of making contact with the Chris-
tian kingdom of Prester John to enlist aid in attacking the Ottoman
Turks, but the precise location of this kingdom was a mystery until
the Portuguese actually reached the East by sea.9 Once they did
reach the East, the Portuguese rulers attempted to seize control of
trade between Asia and Europe in certain specified commodities
and to finance their imports to Europe by plunder, trading profits,
trade monopolies, and the exaction of protection costs."' The con-
trol of the export of gold from Sofala fitted into the third of these
categories. However, the primary energies of the Portuguese were
concentrated in obtaining quantities of pepper, cloves, ginger, cin-
namon, and other spices for export through the sea route, and their
main energies were directed toward India and to a lesser extent
toward the East Indies and China. Their accounts describe how

This content downloaded from 95.183.200.251 on Thu, 16 Feb 2017 08:38:41 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 De Silva / ERASURE OF EAST AFRICAN COMMERCE 691

Muslim merchants dominated the overseas trade. It became also

clear to them in time that these Muslims were not merely Arabs and
other Maghrib Muslims but also converts to Islam from India, Per-
sia, and the East Indies. The merchants from India, particularly the
Gujeratis, played a key role in seaborne trade of the time and they
were found in virtually all of the East African ports. Portuguese his-
torian Damiao de Goes reports on Malindi that 'The greatest
number of merchants who live in this town are from Gujerat in th
kingdom of Cambaya" (Theal, 1898-1903, p. 83). This combina-
tion of the importance of Indian products and Indian merchants led
to the emergence of the concept of Mar Indiano or Indian Sea,
which was later converted to that of an Indian Ocean. I do not sug-
gest that the Indian Ocean littoral cannot be studied as a commer-
cial unit in the way that Braudel (1981 ) has approached the study of
the Mediterranean Sea. However, due to the nature of the sources
available and the concentration of research on trade in the northern
areas of the ocean, the role of African traders in the region in the
period up to and even during the colonial era has been obscured,
even in excellent studies such as Chaudhuri's Trade and Civiliza-
tion in the Indian Ocean (1985). East Africa has been relegated to
the periphery. But if there was an Indian Ocean, there was also an
African Sea in which African traders of different hues played a
major role, and the role of these traders is one of the underrated
aspects of African history.
Finally, I will reflect for a moment on methodology. Historians
grapple with the issue of how to hear and recover a multiplicity of
voices from the past. Often what we have is the voice of the victor
whether you look at it from the viewpoint of race, class, or gender.
In the absence of (or at least due to the paucity of) indigenous
source material for the history of many parts of Asia and Africa dur-
ing this period, we need to develop techniques of critical historiog-
raphy, to read between the lines of colonial documents and to keep
in mind how they are reflective and reproductive of power, to arrive
at a more balanced picture of how groups of people saw one another
in the past, and to assess how the knowledge of such perceptions
could improve our understanding of the past (de Silva, 1994). I have
one other concern as well. All groups, not least the Portuguese,

This content downloaded from 95.183.200.251 on Thu, 16 Feb 2017 08:38:41 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
692 JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES / MAY 1999

have different voices. When I speak of a Portuguese perception, I

am somewhat reluctantly conveying a dominant view that emerges
in the documents and in the process some nuances might very well
be lost. More sophisticated analysis of this issue will hopefully be a
part of a longer and deeper study that this article might inspire.

NOTES

1. Research in the last 40 years has emphasized that Christians often fought oth
tians as much as Muslims (see Mackay, 1977, p. 90).
2. On the Oba of Benin, see Alan Ryder (1969).
3. For good brief surveys of the Songhay Empire, see Niane (1984, pp. 194-210) and
Oliver (1977, pp. 415-462).
4. Earlier interpretations that the Kongo ruler Nzinga Nkuwu attempted to Westernize
and Christianize his people have been challenged by scholars who argue that the Kongo peo-
ple actually interpreted Christianity as a newer version of theirown rituals (see Hilton, 1985).
5. Located in the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, Codice 3016 ff. 5-6.
6. See also the regimento of Gongalo de Sequeira, dated March 16, 1510: "If you come
across ships to Calcut or of Mecca capture them and if three or four are good enough to sail to
the kingdom send them and sell the others." The Muslims were soon aware of Portuguese
policy (see Shaikh Zeen-ud-Deen, 1833, p. 79).
7. Located in the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, Codice 3016 ff. 4.
8. Letter dated June 30, 1513. Mwene Mutapa was the praise name of Nyatsimba Mutota,
the fifth ruler of the Roswi dynasty among the Shona around the Zambezi in the mid-lSth
century. It became the dynastic title of his successors, none of whom really maintained his
power and authority. For more details see Abraham (1962), Alpers (1970), and Randles
(1975).
9. The ambiguities of Portuguese attitudes to a group who were Christian as well as negro
needs a separate study in itself. There are possible comparisons with Portuguese relations
with the Syrian Christians in Kerala, India, and the converts to Catholicism in the Congo. For
literature on Portuguese relations with Ethiopia, see Daya de Silva (1987).
10. On the nature of the Portuguese trading empire, see Niels Steensgaard (1973) and
Sanjay Subrahmanyam (1993).

REFERENCES

Abraham, D. P. (1962). The early political history of the Mwene Mutapa 850-1589. In Histo-
rians in tropicalAfrica (pp. 61-92). Salisbury, Zimbabwe: University College of Rhode-
sia and Nyasaland.

This content downloaded from 95.183.200.251 on Thu, 16 Feb 2017 08:38:41 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 De Silva / ERASURE OF EAST AFRICAN COMMERCE 693

Alpers, E. A. (1970). Dynasties of the Mutapa-Rozwi complex. Journal of African History,

11(2), 203-220.
Barbosa, D. (1918). The book of Duarte Barbosa. An account of the countries bordering on
the Indian Ocean and their inhabitants written by Duarte Barbosa and completed about
the year 1518 A.D. (M. L. Dames, Ed. and Trans.). London: Hakluyt Society. (Original
work published 1550)
Berg, F. J. (1969). The coast from the Portuguese invasion. In B. A. Ogot & J. A. Kienan
(Eds.), Zamani, a survey of East African history (pp. 119-129). Nairobi, Kenya:
Longsmans.
Braudel, F. (1981). The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II
(2nd ed., S. Reynolds, Trans.). London: Harper & Row.
Cabral, P. A. (1938). The voyage ofPedro Alvares Cabral to Brazil and India (W. B. Green-
lee, Trans.). London: Kakluyt Society.
Chaudhuri, K. N. (1985). Trade and civilization in the Indian Ocean: An economic history
from the rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Chittick, N. (1969). The coast before the arrival of the Portuguese. In B. A. Ogot & J. A.
Kienan (Eds.), Zamani, a survey of East African history (pp. 100-118). Nairobi, Kenya:
Longsmans.
Chittick, N. (1977). The East Coast, Madagascar, and the Indian Ocean. In R. Oliver (Ed.),
The Cambridge history of Africa, volume 3: From c. 1050 to c. 1600. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
Cidade, H. (Ed.). (1945). Asia de Joao de Barros. Lisboa, Portugal: Agencia Geralda
Colonias.
de Sequeira, G. (1846). Regimento of 1510. Annaes Maritimos e Colonias, 6(1), 14-15.
de Silva, C. R. (1994). Beyond the Cape: Portuguese encounters with the peoples of South
Asia. In S. S. Schwartz (Ed.), Implicit understandings: Observing, reporting, and
reflecting on the encounters between Europeans and other peoples in the early modern
era (pp. 295-322). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
de Silva, D. (1987). The Portuguese in Asia: An annotated bibliography of studies on Portu-
guese colonial history in Asia, 1498-c. 1800. Zug, Switzerland: Inter Documentation
Company.
Documents on the Portuguese in Mozambique and Central Africa, volume II, 1507-1510.
(1963). Lisbon, Portugal: Centro dos Estudos Historicos Ultramarinos.
Documents on the Portuguese in Mozambique and Central Africa, volume 111, 1511-1514.
(1964). Lisbon, Portugal: Centro dos Estudos Historicos Ultramarinos.
Documents on the Portuguese in Mozambique and Central Africa, volume V1 1517-1518.
(1966). Lisbon, Portugal: Centro dos Estudos Historicos Ultramarinos.
Friedman, J. B. (1994). Cultural readings in medieval world maps. In S. S. Schwartz (Ed.),
Implicit understandings: Observing, reporting, and reflecting on the encounters
between Europeans and other peoples in the early modern era (pp. 64-95). Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.
Heepe, M. (1928). Suaheli-chronik von Pate [The Swahili chronicle of Pate]. Mitteilungen
der Seminars fur Orientalische Sprachen, XXXI(3), 145-192.
Hilton, A. (1985). The kingdom of Kongo. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lobato, A. (1954-1960). A Expansao Portuguesa em Mozambique de 1499 a 1530 [Portu-
guese expansion in Mozambique from 1499 to 1530]. Lisboa, Portugal: Agencia Geral
do Ultramar.

This content downloaded from 95.183.200.251 on Thu, 16 Feb 2017 08:38:41 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
694 JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES / MAY 1999

Mackay, A. (1977). Spain in the middle ages: From frontier to empire, 1000-1500. London:
Macmillan.
Niane, D. T. (Ed.). (1984). Africafrom the twelfth to the sixteenth century. Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press.
Oliver, R. (Ed.). (1977a). The Cambridge history ofAfricavolume 3: From c. 1050 to c. 1600.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Oliver, R. (Ed.). (1977b). The Cambridge history of Africa volume II: From c. 1507 to c.
1570. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Randles, W.G.L. (1975). L'Empire du Monomotapa du Xve au XIX sicele [The empire of
Monomotapa from the XVth to the XIXth century]. Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en
Sciences Sociales.
Ravenstein, E. G. (Ed. and Trans.). (1898). A journal of the voyage of Vasco da Gama
1497-1499. London: Hakluyt Society.
Ryder, A. (1969). Benin and the Europeans, 1485-1897. New York: Humanities Press.
Steensgaard, N. (1973). Carracks, caravans and companies: The structural crisis in
European-Asian trade in the seventeenth century. Odense, Denmark: Scandinavian
Institute of Asian Studies.
Strandes, J. (1961). The Portuguese period in East Africa (J. F. Wallwork, Trans.). Nairobi,
Kenya: East African Literature Bureau.
Subrahmanyam, S. (1993). The Portuguese Empire in Asia 1500-1 700: A political and eco-
nomic history. New York: Longmans.
Theal, G. M. (Ed.). (1898-1903). Records of South Eastern Africa. London: Government of
the Cape Colony.
Zeen-ud-Deen, S. (1833). Tohfut-ul-Mujahideen [Struggles of holy men] (M. J. Rowland-
son, Trans.). London: Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland.

Chandra Richard De Silva holds a Ph.D. from the University of London. He is cur-
rently chairperson in the Department of History, Old Dominion University, Virginia.
Dr. De Silva is interested in many facets of history, such as South Asia, Portugal,
colonial, and ethnicity. He has authored and coedited many works, including Educa-
tion in Sri Lanka, 1948-1988 (1990) and Asian Panorama: Essays in Asian History
(1990).

This content downloaded from 95.183.200.251 on Thu, 16 Feb 2017 08:38:41 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms