The Limits of the Caravan Trade: Cloth Imports into Interior Central East Africa, c. 1850–1900

This chapter examines the scale, composition, and geographic distribution of cloth imports in the interior of central East Africa during the second half of the nineteenth century, when imported commodities—particularly cloth—were taken from Zanzibar into the adjacent mainland interior through what is today Tanzania to exchange for ivory. The price of imported cloth rose dramatically as imports moved inland, while the price of ivory was comparatively low in the interior but increased substantially as tusks neared the coast and Zanzibar, where they were sold at high rates to global buyers. As a result, even as central East Africa’s ivory exports boomed, and cloth imports into Zanzibar rose, the supply of imported cloth remained comparatively modest in much of the deep interior, where it was used as a valuable commodity currency through the century. This chapter argues that the effects of nineteenth-century cloth imports on interior textile industries were far more limited than many scholars have assumed.