Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar. Abdul Sheriff

       Introduction

       The Commercial Empire

      Zanzibar developed during the nineteenth century as the seat of a vast commercial empire that in some ways resembled the mercantile empires of Europe of the preceding centuries. Unlike them, however, it was developing at a time when capitalism was already on its way to establishing its sway over industrial production and was subordinating merchant capital to its own needs. In the capitalist metropoles this entailed the disintegration of merchant capital’s monopoly position and the reduction of its rate of profit to the general average. It was thus being reduced to an agent of productive capital with a specific function: distributing goods produced by industry and supplying the latter with the necessary raw materials.¹

      But capitalism was simultaneously developing as a world system as it gradually drew the different corners of the globe into its fold. In this historic process merchant capital played a vanguard role. As a form of capital it shared the dynamism arising out of profit maximisation and the drive towards accumulation of the capitalist classes. This drive, therefore, pushed it to encourage constant expansion in the scale of production of exchange values without itself participating in actual production. Existing as it did at the periphery of the expanding capitalist system, it seemed to enjoy its pristine position and relative autonomy. Backward conditions here enabled it to monopolise trade and appropriate a handsome rate of profit that appeared to guarantee primacy to the merchant classes. That primacy, however, was illusory, for capitalism was close on their heels, subverting them step by step, and ultimately subordinating them to its own rule. In examining the history of Zanzibar during the nineteenth century, therefore, it is necessary to consider closely what Karl Marx termed the ‘historical facts about merchant capital’.²

      Zanzibar was essentially a commercial intermediary between the African interior and the capitalist industrialising West, and it acted as a conveyor belt transmitting the demands of the latter for African luxuries and raw materials, and supplying in exchange imported manufactured goods. Economic movements in East Africa from the eighteenth century onwards were primarily based on two major commodities and two fundamental transformations. Increased Omani participation in Indian Ocean trade, particularly after the overthrow of Portuguese hegemony over their coastline, had given impetus to the emergence of an Omani merchant class which began to invest part of its profit in the production of dates using slave labour. To this important but limited demand for African slaves was added during the last third of the eighteenth century a substantial French demand for slaves to be supplied to their sugar colonies in the Mascarenes³ and even to the Americas. But the period characterised by European mercantilism, of which the slave trade was an aspect, was rapidly drawing to a close. The strangulation of the European slave trade after the end of Anglo-French warfare in the Indian Ocean, however, provided an unexpected opportunity and a new lease of life to the slave mode of production in East Africa at the periphery of the world system dominated by capital. A vital transformation of the slave sector was therefore initiated during the first quarter of the nineteenth century as Arab slave traders began to divert slaves to the clove plantations of Zanzibar, and later to the grain plantations on the East African coast. Thus the sector was metamorphosed from being primarily one dominated by the export of slave labour to one that exploited that labour within East Africa to produce commodities to feed into the world system of trade.

      The second economic transformation was activated initially by the collapse of the supply of ivory from Mozambique