Rise of the Coastal Consumer: Coast-Side Drivers of East Africa’s Cotton Cloth Imports, 1830–1900

This chapter turns attention to the coast of mainland Tanzania and the adjacent island of Zanzibar, which served as East Africa’s principal global trading entrepôt through the nineteenth century. It argues that both the scale and composition of foreign cloth imported into nineteenth-century East Africa were heavily influenced by activity in costal and near-coast regions. A rise in cloth import levels from the mid-1830s was partly a result of competitive commercial practices of foreign trading groups stationed on Zanzibar. Consequently, cloth imports often exceeded demand during this early phase of the region’s nineteenth-century global trade integration. By the 1870s, however, consumer demand on and near the coast was growing immensely, in tandem with a surge in exports of coast-produced goods that increased the buying power of coast-area consumers. Amid rising imports, domestic manufacturing persisted in parts of coastal East Africa, including on Zanzibar and the Benadir Coast.