David P. Bresnahan. <i>Inland from Mombasa. East Africa and the Making of the Indian Ocean</i> . University of California Press, Oakland (CA) 2025. xii, 229 pp. Maps. $34.95, £30.00. (E-book: $12.99, £10.99.)

Mainstream economic anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians define the Swahili coast as a dynamic zone of connections and a gateway to globalization.This understanding has been based on studies drawing on archaeological, documentary, and historical accounts from the elite people of several large medieval cities: Kilwa; Mombasa; Lamu; and, later, Zanzibar.These cities had deep harbors that allowed them to develop into large centers of trade, attracting and hosting merchants from the wider Indian Ocean.Academics have primarily viewed the Swahili elite as brokers who forged social and economic networks with inland communities of foragers, herders, and farmers for the provision of trade items: food to sustain the urban populations and ivory, destined for export.These inland communities were small and culturally distinct, pursuing divergent subsistence strategies.Their role in the making of the Swahili world has not been fully appreciated.Although they did not fit neatly into the rubric of global trade and brokerage, scholarship has viewed their integration into Indian Ocean commerce as inevitable.Inland from Mombasa, a book that arose from Bresnahan's doctoral research, is inspired by studies that have increasingly deviated from Fernand Braudel's foundational study of the Mediterranean. 1 Braudelian approaches -viewing the Indian Ocean as a unifying economic system -have failed to see the "specificity and diversity of local circumstances in the different societies living along the ocean shores" (p.14).In contrast, Bresnahan integrates historical linguistics, archival material, and oral traditions to reconstruct a millennial history of the Mijikenda-speaking peoples of the Kenyan coast. 2 His research reveals that, throughout much of the period, Mijikenda-speaking inland societies maintained limited engagement with oceanic trade, urban cosmopolitanism, and empires.He reframes the Swahili coast as a dynamic zone of asymmetrical connections instead of seeing it as a straightforward gateway to globalization.Inland communities were active agents who sometimes embraced and sometimes resisted coastal cosmopolitanism and empire.Their relationship with the coast -with whom they forged social and economic networks -was not guaranteed.In many ways, it 1