Buying Time. Thomas F. McDow
Jane Hathaway, Robin Judd, Ousman Kobo, Scott Levi, Jennifer Siegel, Ahmad Sikainga, Mytheli Sreenivas, Christina Sessa, and Ying Zhang read, commented on, and discussed parts of this project with me and made it better. I am also grateful to the smart folks in the Space and Sovereignty Working Group, including Lisa Bhungalia, Melissa Curley, Becky Mansfield, Katherine Marino, Nada Moumtaz, Juno Parrenas, and Noah Tamarkin, for workshopping two chapters and generally being great intellectual company. Roxanne Willis’s editorial pen, friendship, and guidance helped me solidify chapters into a draft manuscript, and her encouragement made it fun.
I am also indebted to other academic friends who have helped me think through my work and sustained me: Eric Allina, Fahad Bishara, Bill Bissel, Justin Beckham, Sarah Beckham, David Bernstein, Lori Flores, Matt Hopper, Erik Gilbert, Sarah Igo, Pranav Jani, Arash Khazeni, Steve Lassonde, Jesse Kwiek, Lisa Moses Leff, Roger Levine, Nate Mathews, Christian McMillen, Ole Molvig, Ben Siegel, Wendy Warren, Eric Worby, and Ali al-Zefeiti. The friendships and insights of Todd Keithley and Ron Birnbaum have enriched me for nearly three decades.
Since I first started following people moving across the Indian Ocean, I have had three amazing children. While they have been incredible sources of inspiration, I could not have completed this project without the work of those who helped us take care of them, especially Kathleen Bergin, Abbie Carver, Bryna Harrington, Matt Miller, Kim Moore, Paige Phillips, Leyla Said, and Marielle Schweickart. A cadre of like-minded parents and neighbors has also sustained us: Seth Abel and Steffanie Wilk, Dana and Brent Adler, Tom and Andrea Easley, Maggie and Jeff Gumbinner, Gretchen Eiselt and Matt Harding, Elena Irwin and Brian Roe, Kelly Lynch and John Wix, Gillian Thomson and Kent Johnson, Cindy and Scott Tyson, and Kit Yoon and Jim MacDonald.
This is also a book about kinship. Thank you to my extended family, especially my own parents Croom and Sandy Coward, Thomas and Lucy McDow, and Bob and Peg Norris. Randy and Suzanne Whitfield read and patiently commented on a draft, and Clarkson McDow gave key feedback on the proposal. Maggie and Jeff Gumbinner, Randolph and Lauren McDow, Will and Leslie McDow, Mary Rincon, Eston Whitfield, and Louisa Whitfield unwittingly helped write chapter 5 by blurring the lines between siblings and cousins. Abby and Piers Norris Turner have been invaluable collaborators in all aspects of life. Maggie, Franklin, and Solomon McDow make every day better. The last person is always the most important: Without Alison Norris, this book, and my life, would not be complete.
While these pages may be poor recompense for everything that I have gained in writing them, I appreciate that the debts I have accrued bind together a wonderful network of colleagues, friends, and family that make this all worthwhile.
Note on Terms, Translation, and Transliteration
IN AMITAV GHOSH’S IBIS trilogy of historical novels that move across the worlds of the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century, the characters speak in a variety of argots and cants specific to their particular social milieu. These include phrases from dialects of English, Hindi, Chinese, and Malayan languages, among others. Ghosh renders these wonderfully, yet I suspected that one of his goals in immersing the reader in this linguistic confusion is to underscore the multiethnic, polylingual world his characters inhabited. In this book, I would like to avoid this.
Certainly linguistic puzzles are one of the charms of the Indian Ocean. In an early round of research, I realized that the hard-to-decipher letter in front of me was not in Arabic, despite the script, but Portuguese. In this book, I have tried to solve all those puzzles for the reader by using common English spellings, where they exist, for words from other languages. In the text, I have dropped diacriticals from common names (Said for Sa‘īd, Muhammad for Muḥammad), though included them in the index. I have also used the historical place names for the period (Kutch for Kachchh, Bombay for Mumbai, Lake Nyasa for Lake Malawi). For Arabic terms and phrases that I transliterated, I have followed the standards of the International Journal of Middle East Studies for the first usage, and dropped the diacritical marks subsequently. Unless otherwise noted, all currencies are listed in Maria Theresa dollars (MT$).
Although I hope to evoke a world like Ghosh does, I am not a novelist. As a historian, one of my goals has been to translate this Indian Ocean world and ease your journey through it.
Introduction
Temporizing across the Indian Ocean
HE PROMISED TO DO it in two years. In 1869, Juma bin Salim wrote a contract, in his own hand in Arabic, to deliver 10,500 pounds of ivory to Zanzibar in two years. In exchange for a substantial advance, he agreed to bring the ivory to Ladha Damji, a Hindu financier and the leading creditor on that Indian Ocean island. In authoring the contract, Juma used the most formal version of his name—Juma bin Salim bin Mbarak bin Abdullah al-Bakri—and identified his hometown, Nizwa, in distant Oman. More than a decade before, Juma had left Oman and joined the caravan trails in central Africa, where he became known as Juma Merikani. He was famous for importing merikani, American-made cotton sheeting, which he exchanged for elephant tusks. Juma identified Ladha with an honorific title, the Arabicized version of his name, and by his position as the agent of “our lord,” the sultan of Zanzibar. The contract spelled out the exact weight of ivory and established that Ladha would pay the taxes on it. This was convenient, since Ladha and his firm collected all the taxes for the sultan.1
While Juma’s Arabic contract was very detailed, its formality left many things—not just Juma’s colorful nickname—unwritten. It did not mention money or acknowledge that Ladha had ever lent money to Juma. Those arrangements were kept separate to avoid the Islamic prohibition on interest. The elements of the contract reveal a historical process rooted in Islamic finance and adapted to a burgeoning global commodity trade. Fulfilling the contract’s promise required the cooperation (and coercion) of people from the Indian Ocean littoral and the residents of its interior hinterlands: Africans, Arabs, and Indians. Juma’s contract also spanned a vast geography: his hometown was in the interior of eastern Arabia, and his debt would require him to travel to new ivory outposts near the Congo’s tributaries. This contract for African ivory included a set of global exchanges: the capital financing his journey came from Bombay, and the cotton sheeting he exchanged for ivory came from American mills in Massachusetts. When the contract was written, the ivory was still attached to elephants in upland Africa, and at least fifty of them would need to be killed to meet the contract’s terms. All this would take time, and time mediated the relationships between the people, geography, and commodities in this contract. As for the intermediaries, complex negotiations, and travel required to repay the debt to Ladha, Juma bin Salim had two years to figure it out.
FIGURE 0.1. Juma bin Salim al-Bakri al-Nizwi’s 1869 acknowledgment of ivory debt. Registered deed 1063 of 1888, AM 12/20, Zanzibar National Archives.
Juma bin Salim was one of a multitude of migrants in the western Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century, and his life course represents one path among a wide range of trajectories that transformed the region. Juma bin Salim was originally from Nizwa, an ancient city in the interior of Oman, but he made his name as an ivory trader in central Africa, where he would eventually be buried in 1887. At the time of his death, he had been an active trader on Lake Tanganyika and the Congo tributaries for thirty-some years. Juma bin Salim controlled large stores of ivory, managed plantations of rice and maize, had several African wives, and was a vital source of geographic knowledge for the few Europeans who had reached the center of the continent.2
What set this world into motion? Why would date farmers and city dwellers from Arabian oases leave their homes for uncertain ventures in East Africa? Part of the explanation is environmental. In the late 1830s, three decades before Juma bin Salim wrote his promissory note, an extreme drought in the interior of Oman led many residents to leave for the Arabian coast and the Indian Ocean world. But economics and politics also contributed. Around the same time as the drought, the Omani sultan—motivated by trade and strategy—relocated his court and his capital from