Erik Gilbert

The history & conservation of Zanzibar Stone Town

Zanzibar Stone Town presents the problems of conservation in its most acute forms. Should it be fossilised for the tourists? Or should it grow for the benefit of the inhabitants? Can ways be found to accommodate conflicting social and economic pressures? For its size Zanzibar, like Venice, occupies a remarkably large romantic space in world imagination. Swahili civilisation on these spice islands goes back to the earliest centuries of the Islamic era. Up until the nineteenth century it was the capital of a trading empire which spread Kiswahili and Islam over a large part of eastern and central African and the Indian Ocean. Zanzibar then suffered the loss of its empire to the Germans and the British. In the last thirty years it has passed through its second period of crisis. After the Revolution of 1964 the new rural owners did not have the wherewithal to maintain the old stone houses. The Stone Town seemed to be on the verge of extinction. In the 1980s the government reversed its policies and the old town became threatened by rapid redevelopment which disfigures as it builds. The Old Stone Town now stands in danger of being drastically transformed by tourism and trade liberalisation.

The politics of slave trade suppression in Britain and France, 1814-48 : diplomacy, morality and economics

List of Tables Acknowledgements Notes List of Abbreviations Introduction 1814-1815 1815-1818 1818-1822 1822-1827 1827-1833 1833-1840 1840-1848 Conclusion Endnotes Bibliography Index

The dhow as cultural icon: heritage and regional identity in the western Indian Ocean

Dhows, the traditional sailing ships of the western Indian Ocean, are currently used in museums, heritage sites and popular culture as a symbol of a regional culture in the western Indian Ocean. While scholars have embraced the notion of seas as cultural or historical units, this type of ‘basin thinking’ is a recent phenomenon in the Indian Ocean. Over the last 150 years the dhow has gone from being a despised symbol of the slave trade and economic underdevelopment to representing a romanticized past and a regional identity. This article traces the parallel development of the idea of the dhow as a symbol of regional identity and changing perceptions of both the vessels and the region it is taken to represent. It argues that recent representations of dhows as cultural heritage represent a new and developing notion of regional identity within the western Indian Ocean.