This original collection brings islands to the fore in a growing body of scholarship on the
Indian Ocean examining them as hubs or points of convergence and divergence in a world of
maritime movements and exchanges. Straddling history and anthropology and grounded in the
framework of connectivity the book tackles central themes such as smallness translocality
and the island factor. It moves to the farthest reaches of the region with a rich variety of
case studies on the Swahili-Comorian world the Maldives Indonesia and more. With remarkable
breadth and cohesion these essays capture the circulations of people goods rituals
sociocultural practices and ideas that constitute the Indian Ocean world. Together they take
up islandness as an explicit empirical and methodological issue as few have done before.
