Vient de paraître Africa and the Indian Ocean World from Early Times to Circa 1900 de Gwyn Campbell aux Cambridge University Press

Vient de paraître Africa and the Indian Ocean World from Early Times to Circa 1900 de Gwyn Campbell aux Cambridge University Press, coll. "New Approaches to African History", 2019, 316 p. ISBN : 9780521008068 Prix : 22,99 £ (existe aussi en version électronique).

"The history of Africa’s historical relationship with the rest of the Indian Ocean world is one of a vibrant exchange that included commodities, people, flora and fauna, ideas, technologies and disease. This connection with the rest of the Indian Ocean world, a macro-region running from Eastern Africa, through the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia to East Asia, was also one heavily influenced by environmental factors. In presenting this rich and varied history, Gwyn Campbell argues that human-environment interaction, more than great men, state formation, or imperial expansion, was the central dynamic in the history of the Indian Ocean world (IOW). Environmental factors, notably the monsoon system of winds and currents, helped lay the basis for the emergence of a sophisticated and durable IOW ’global economy’ around 1,500 years before the so-called European ’Voyages of Discovery’. Through his focus on human-environment interaction as the dynamic factor underpinning historical developments, Campbell radically challenges Eurocentric paradigms, and lays the foundations for a new interpretation of IOW history."

Gwyn Campbell is a Canada Research Chair and founding Director of the Indian Ocean World Centre at McGill University, Montréal. He served as an academic consultant for the South African Government in the run-up to the formation of an Indian Ocean regional association in 1997 and has published widely on Africa and the wider Indian Ocean world, including David Griffiths and the Missionary ’History of Madagascar’ (2012) and An Economic History of Imperial Madagascar, 1750–1895 (Cambridge, 2005).