East Africa, the Comoros Islands and Madagascar before the sixteenth century On a neglected part of the World-System

'[The port of ] Somanâth [Gujarat] has become so successful because it is […] a stopping point for people travelling between Sofala and the Zanj country and China' (al-Bîrûnî, ca. 1030, trans. The historical developments of East Africa and its region are illuminated by the cycles of the Eurasian and African world-system, where the Indian Ocean is embedded. It is in this framework that we can best understand the rise of the Swahili culture as a semi-periphery between dominant cores and dominated social groups which were situated in the African interior and on outlying islands (Comoros, Madagascar) or were composed of lower classes in urban territories. On the Swahili coast, a 'proto-capitalism' thrived within a culture of city-states where state and private modes of accumulation complemented rather than rivalled each other. Madagascar exemplifies a peripheral construction within this global context, with cities emerging where Indian Ocean networks and insular routes converged. For geographic as well as historical reasons, different areas of the world-system appear to have played a pre-eminent role on the East African coast at different times. Societal movements also partly grow out of internal dynamics which in themselves modify regional evolutions. For this reason, within the world-system, the entire set of interactions between the local, regional and global levels should be taken into account. Like the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean was traversed by ships from a very early date. The development of exchange networks in this ocean led to a progressive integration of its different regions into a stratified space and to the rise of littoral societies. At the beginning of the Christian era, the articulation of the Indian Ocean with the China Sea and the Mediterranean, and the interconnections between maritime and terrestrial routes, seem to have built a Eurasian and African world-These exchanges were not only an extension of government policy: they were also frequently the result of religious expansion and private enterprise.