Merchants: An Essay in Historical Ethnography*[Note 2. I am grateful for comments on drafts of this ...]

Merchants differ from traders in that they act as intermediaries between different producers and consumers. An example discussed here is that of the Swahili merchants of the East African coast, who flourished in the early Modern Era. The several Swahili port towns established control of mercantile exchange between the African interior and the peoples of the western Indian Ocean. Exchange was based on relations of affinity and quasi‐kinship established by the Swahili at the centre. They used locally minted coins as counters of value; exchanges were negotiated in the security and purity of Swahili houses; and the merchants, by adroit use of gifts of luxuries to others along the coast, were able to influence or even control the local system of ranking and power. They were colonized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the Arabian state of Oman, which established the sultanate of Zanzibar, with a quite a different pattern of exchange. The Swahili are today no more than marginal merchants. Their organization of exchange was similar to that of other mercantile societies of the early colonial period.