Facing the land, facing the sea: Commercial transformation and urban dynamics in the Red Sea port of Massawa, 1840s--1900s (Eritrea)

This dissertation examines the making of a complex Red Sea urban coastal society in Massawa (in present day Eritrea) in the second half of the nineteenth century. As a centuries-old port town Massawa's traditional role and raison d'etre has been to mediate between multiple commercial spheres connecting regions of the northeast African interior and beyond it with regions of the Middle East and South Asia. My study examines how a particular new conjuncture of political, economic, technological and migratory factors in the wider Red Sea and western Indian Ocean area in the middle decades of the century transformed Massawa. It re-organized the structure of its commercial relationships, which, as a result, shaped the particular social and cultural make-up of the port-town's inhabitants.; At the heart of the study is an examination of the town's leading families who traced their origins both to areas of the northeast African interior and to a variety of overseas locations and who operated in the port-town principally as merchants, brokers and entrepreneurs. This "aristocratic class," as one Italian colonial official qualified it, dominated the town's legal, commercial and religious institutions and developed a strong sense of local urban yet sophisticated worldly identity reflecting a distinct sense of esprit de corps. They particularly stressed their refined urban culture, a strong link to the wider community of Muslim believers (umma), and a sense of connectedness to Arab history and culture. I analyze the social, religious and material bases of their power (or different forms of capital) as well as the complex social and cultural mechanisms and strategies that enabled them to perform and protect their role as a flexible janus-faced community simultaneously facing land and sea but remaining distinct from both. I thus reveal the inner structure of a community of mediators, tracing the chains and networks of linkages that connected the town's hinterlands to its forelands.; The study refutes perceptions viewing Massawa as "alien" to its environment by historically contextualizing its specificity and deconstructing the development of its culturally outgoing dispositions, but at the same time locally rooted social realities in a period of great political, economic and social change. The study presents a more local/region-based historical perspective in an arena of northeastern African historiography that is still being vigorously debated by scholars almost entirely in nationalist discourses. It also links the Eritrean-Ethiopian region---traditionally perceived as somewhat isolated from its broader environment---with the wider world of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. The study is based on a wide variety of nineteenth-century European sources, Italian colonial archival materials, Arabic language sources, oral data collected in Eritrea, and a newly-discovered collection of legal records from Massawa's Islamic court.