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.