Buying Time. Thomas F. McDow
a larger pattern of migration from Arabia and India to Zanzibar and the African coast in the nineteenth century. Zanzibar was where Juma bin Salim promised to deliver ivory to Ladha Damji, who had himself been born into poverty in Kutch in western India. Ladha Damji became notoriously wealthy in Zanzibar as the head of the island’s most important commercial house, as well as the sultan’s master of the customs revenue. Ladha invested heavily in slaves and ivory by lending money to caravan leaders like Juma bin Salim. His investment portfolio included loans for ivory, plantations, and houses. Juma bin Salim’s contract gave him two years to fulfill its terms. He set to work, crossing from Zanzibar to the mainland, hiring a band of porters, and organizing a caravan to travel hundreds of miles into the African interior. During his travels, Juma bin Salim acquired great stores of ivory, gave loans to European explorers, and eventually chose not to return to Zanzibar to face his creditor.
MAP 0.1. The western Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century
In the nineteenth century, ivory became East Africa’s most valuable export, and it complemented a rise in plantation culture on the East African coast. Ivory and plantations spurred an economic boom in Zanzibar. Ivory was the plastic of its day, used in manufacturing a wide array of items, and, like copal, cloves, and coconuts, one of many East African commodities with a growing global demand. Juma bin Salim and other caravan leaders of his era tried to meet the increasing demand for tusks by venturing deeper into the African interior to find elephants. In the 1840s, Juma’s colleagues crossed from the eastern part of the continent to the west, two generations before Europeans.3 By the late 1860s when he drew up his contract with Ladha Damji, Juma bin Salim had been a caravan trader for at least a decade. His early trips revealed the amount of ivory in the eastern Congo, and by the 1860s an “ivory fever” had developed there akin to the California Gold Rush or the scramble for diamonds in South Africa.4 Ivory fever had consequences for peoples and polities across east and central Africa. Indeed, Juma’s 1869 contract with Ladha Damji was part of a cresting wave that thrust residents of the Indian Ocean basin into deeper and more frequent contact with peoples of Central Africa. These waves of contact created pools of Indian Ocean culture far into the interior. Juma settled in the eastern Congo, and many travelers observed “second Zanzibars” in Africa. The undertow of this movement swept away ivory and the Africans who harvested it—first to the littoral and then out to sea. An ocean away, these same tides pulled Arabs from interior towns, while the wealth from East Africa reconfigured Arab settlements and local politics.
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Buying Time is a history of how nineteenth-century credit and mobility knit together a vast region, extending from the deserts of Arabia to the equatorial forests of Africa’s Congo watershed. Juma bin Salim and others who created this western Indian Ocean world—Africans, Arabs, and Indians—used monsoon winds and ancient trade routes to link port cities to distant hinterlands. They relied on Islamic financial instruments with deep roots in Indian Ocean exchanges to record obligations of creditors and debtors. From the 1820s onward these men and women endeavored to take advantage of the new opportunities—as traders, as patrons, and as clients—available in an increasingly globalized economy. When their initial strategies failed, or when they met resistance from entrenched hierarchies, they bought time. Time allowed them to escape drought, seek new markets, acquire ivory, reconfigure life paths, and often—but not always—pay off debts. In the half century before European colonization, Africans, Arabs, and Indians used credit and new circuits of mobility to seek out new opportunities, establish themselves as men of means in distant places, and maintain families in a rapidly changing economy. To tell this story, this book traces people’s movements and the financial flows that underwrote their activities. It is a story told in previously unexplored Arabic contracts. The documents that lie at the heart of this book illustrate the startling reach of the Indian Ocean world even as they convey the individual aspirations of the people who inhabited it.
As a social history of interconnected Indian Ocean worlds, this book is foremost about people: families who left date farms in Arabia; freed slaves who bet on the ivory trade; sultans and their rivals; displaced Swahili elites; religious ideologues; mixed race Indo-Africans; dissident traders; sophisticated scribes; African porters; Arab confectioners; and an eloping Arab princess who became a German housewife and author. The members of this diverse group inhabited overlapping regions in Arabia and Africa. They also shared a set of scribal practices and used fixed formulas to carry out transactions. Their documents cut across a world now rife with national boundaries. At the same time, they created obligations between creditors and debtors. These obligations fit into broader Indian Ocean patterns of patronage and clientship, which crossed ethnic, geographic, and cultural groupings. By focusing on the strategies that individuals developed in the face of broader changes, this book examines the complex, interwoven, and mobile societies that existed in the western Indian Ocean in the years before formal colonialism would undermine these ties.
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This book joins a growing body of scholarly literature in oceanic history, a field pioneered by Fernand Braudel, whose 1949 history of the sixteenth-century Mediterranean “world” recognized that the sea was not a true boundary during that period. In many ways, Braudel anticipated the work of more recent scholars examining the latest wave of globalization. He noted that the civilization of the Mediterranean “spreads far beyond its shores in great waves that are balanced by continual returns,” and suggests, “We should imagine a hundred frontiers, not one, some political, some economic, some cultural.” Without looking at this zone of influence, it would be difficult to grasp the sea’s history.5 In his formulation, the Mediterranean pulsed, creating a dynamic “world” over time. Braudel’s work became the foundation for a new scholarship of oceanic spaces, and comprehensive histories of the Indian Ocean have explicitly attempted to adopt Braudel’s model.6 The proliferation of Braudel-inspired studies around the world gave rise to a “new thalassology” (the study of the sea), and the Indian Ocean has emerged as an important space in this new field.7
Despite the Indian Ocean’s much longer standing as an arena of human interaction and cross-cultural exchange, the Atlantic Ocean has attracted more scholarly attention. One result of this has been a lopsided sibling rivalry between oceanic adherents—lopsided in the sense that scholars of the Indian Ocean have been the ones to call attention to the slights of inclusion and perceived inequalities. For example, the Indian Ocean was left out of a forum on “Oceans of History” in the American Historical Review that focused only on the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Pacific.8 Scholars of slavery in the Indian Ocean have been particularly diligent in trying to provincialize Atlantic plantation chattel slavery as but one of many forms of bondage and dependence.9 In both oceanic worlds, however, Africa has historically been given short shrift, generally characterized by slavery and its human contributions to the slave trade. Recent scholarship by Atlantic Africanists, however, although focused on slavery generally, offer models and insights that can enrich Indian Ocean histories through biography and micro-history, paying attention to the dynamic changes in port cities, and mapping oceanic actors in broader hinterlands.10 A focus on Africa’s relationship to its western ocean has profitably expanded the scope of Atlantic world studies, and in this book the Indian Ocean world is inconceivable without Africa.
The boundaries of the Indian Ocean world varied over time, and this book demonstrates how the nineteenth century was the time of their greatest extent and their greatest incorporation of Africa. Many anthropologists and social scientists have grappled with late twentieth-century (and early twenty-first-century) globalization. From their perspective, nation-states and continents break down, failing to be useful containers of human activity. Arjun Appadurai calls them “problematic heuristic devices,” and scholars have approached subjects across national boundaries that have revealed new insights about the global order.11 One of these approaches replaces standard geographic considerations with “process geographies” that can shift (like Braudel’s pulsing Mediterranean) and focuses on “congeries of language, history, and material life.”12 Newer historical studies of the Indian Ocean have used innovative and unconventional sources (like genealogies of diasporic