SELECTED PHASES OF THE HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF MAJOR EASTERN PORTS

Abstract

Before the nineteenth century the East African coast formed an interal part of the Indian Ocean commercial system, and because of changing internal and external space relations, successive historical epochs saw the emergence of widely different port hierarchies. The concept of an ‘open system' - with its progression from movements to trade-routes, nodes, hierarchies to a model -provides a fruitful approach for the evolution of port activity and allows the 'cut' to be made just as much with routes as with ports. Owing to the limited extent of overland connections prior to the seventeenth century, epochs of change in the pattern of port development were marked by the establishment of new overseas connections. At the commencement of the Christian era trade contacts were with the Red Sea, but as eastern Africa then had only two unrelated ports, discussion stops short of a hierarchy. During the Biddle Ages commercial intercourse began with the Persian Gulf, to be followed a few centuries later by direct links with north-west India, and the succession of ports over this period of six centuries enables the construction of a model of the spatial patterns of port locations. With the breakthrough of the Portuguese into the Indian Ocean at the end of the fifteenth century.