Red Sea Citizens: Cosmopolitan Society and Cultural Change in Massawa [Paperback]

In the late 19th century, the port of Massawa, in Eritrea on the Red Sea, was a thriving, vibrant, multiethnic commercial hub.Red Sea Citizenstells the story of how Massawa rose to prominence as one of Northeast Africa's most important shipping centers. Jonathan Miran reconstructs the social, material, religious, and cultural history of this mercantile community in a period of sweeping change. He shows how Massawa and its citizens benefited from migrations across the Indian Ocean, the Arabian peninsula, Egypt, and the African interior. Miran also notes the changes that took place in Massawa as traders did business and eventually settled. By revealing the dynamic processes at play, this book provides insight into the development of the Horn of Africa that extends beyond borders and boundaries, nations and nationalism.

Eritreans, Ethiopians, and Africans in general have often considered Massawa, Eritrea's principal port city, to be an integral part of African civilization. Not so, according to Miran (Western Washington Univ.), who attempts 'to rescue history from the nation,' but not from the vagaries of Ottoman, Arab, Indian, and Italian merchants and adventurers, and the various imperialist powers struggling for dominance in the Red Sea area. This text is a useful microanalysis for historians in search of biographical accounts of alien residential families from regions as far as Kabul, Bombay, Yemen, Turkey, and Bosnia. Readers hear a great deal about immigrant merchant families such as the Hadramis and the al-Ghuls. For a history of the indigenous peoples of Massawa and their heroic struggle to decolonize the region, readers would have to turn to other sources. Miran's Massawa is rather 'inconveniently located' on the African continent, with very limited interconnections with the so-called 'African interior,' but the text involved research in Yemen, Asmara, Rome, C?te d'Ivoire, Paris, and Hamburg, and necessitated painstaking archival research in lc*