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Entry 122 of 240Economic

The Swahili Coast

c. 1200 CE/Africa/Swahili city-states
Today The East African coast (Kilwa, Mombasa, Zanzibar)Span Swahili city-states · c. 1000–1500 CE

Along the East African coast, a chain of city-states — Kilwa, Mombasa, Malindi, Zanzibar — grew wealthy trading African gold, ivory, and timber into the Indian Ocean and taking back Chinese porcelain, Indian cloth, and Persian ceramics. They ran on the monsoon: winds blew ships south for half the year and north for the other half, so the trade had a season. Their language, Swahili, is a Bantu tongue enriched with Arabic borrowings — evidence of centuries of exchange rather than conquest, and it is spoken by over a hundred million people today.

◆ Worth knowingArchaeologists digging medieval Kilwa in Tanzania keep finding Chinese porcelain — and a giraffe from Malindi was shipped to the Ming emperor in 1414, where the court took it for a qilin, a mythical beast whose appearance signalled a virtuous ruler.
◆ The mechanismTrade-route shift

The path or medium of exchange moves, and a place or power rises or declines because it sits on or off the new route.

Also: Migration pressure · State formation & institutional founding

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