David Bresnahan - History Department - The University of Utah

David Bresnahan
Assistant Professor

CTIHB 319

About

My research focuses on East Africa’s engagements with the Indian Ocean world for periods spanning the first millennium to the nineteenth century. My first book, Inland from Mombasa: East Africa and the Making of the Indian Ocean World (2025), is a longue durée history of the Swahili port city of Mombasa from the vantage point of the Mijikenda-speaking communities that lived on the city’s rural edges. The Indian Ocean is often imagined as a “Muslim Lake” or an “archipelago of global cities.” Inland from Mombasa, by contrast, asks what role smaller scale and primarily inland-facing societies played in this oceanic world. I show that Mijikenda-speaking communities influenced East Africa’s connections to the Indian Ocean precisely because they rejected the region’s dominant urban & Islamic-maritime practices. The book makes the case for rejection and divergence as generative features of global connections. Inland from Mombasa is available for free through Luminos, the University of California Press’s Open Access program.

I am currently working on a new project, provisionally titled The Bombay Africans and the Exploration of East Africa. It is a history of Africa’s exploration in the nineteenth century from the perspectives of the intermediaries who worked as headmen and interpreters for David Livingstone, John Hanning Speke, and others. I focus on a group often known as the “Bombay Africans” who were the most well-known intermediaries in nineteenth century East Africa. The Bombay Africans were enslaved in their youth and liberated and educated in India before returning to Africa to join geographical expeditions and mission societies. Using a group biography approach which follows the Bombay Africans lives prior to, during, and in between expeditions, I hope to reframe Africa’s exploration—and intersecting developments like abolition—within the social, cultural, and intellectual registers of late-precolonial East Africa and the western Indian Ocean world.

Education