Encircling Value: Historical Linguistics and Documenting Precolonial Inland African Trade
How do we document what inland East Africans thought about trade in regions without conventional sources? My project, a book manuscript in progress, demonstrates how historical linguistics analysis can reveal a long-term history of interior Africans’ commercial decisions and aspirations. I focused on inland East Africa between Lake Malawi and the coastal Swahili state of Kilwa, an area with sparse archaeological research and no pre-1600s documentary records. My research has demonstrated that these interior African communities had varied inland trade interests and material desires before the 1600s, a corrective to past assumptions that such trade was closely tied to coastal Indian Ocean world material values and trajectories. This poster will highlight research examples that underscore the multiple ways in which historical linguistics analysis illuminates the history of under-documented areas. For example, I compared commercial vocabularies and commodity terms to create a detailed map of inland trade connections. It shows where particular trade goods circulated before the 1600s. We can also learn about collective local understandings of specific material goods (such as brass bangles or the adopted crop of maize) by following the web of meanings preserved in a specific word’s etymology. Through this poster’s research findings, my planned interactive power point presenting these methods step-by-step, and the envisioned discussions, this presentation will help stimulate important reflections on the many ways historians, of both East Africa and other world regions, can benefit from historical linguistics analysis.