An Anticolonial International? Indians, India, and Africans in British Central Africa

Direct and indirect links between the Indian subcontinent and Africa, particularly coastal East Africa, go back many centuries. Well before the era of European overseas expansion, the two regions were constituent parts of a kind of Indian Ocean political economy involving the transfer of goods, people, and various aspects of material and nonmaterial culture.∞However, this earlier commerce produced no recognizable Indian community on the African mainland.