Buying Time. Thomas F. McDow
The Indian Ocean monsoon system has structured mobility around the ocean; likewise, periodic droughts outside the ocean’s intertropical convergence zone created difficulties for date farmers in Arabia’s marginal lands. Arabs left Arabia in greater numbers in times of drought. When cyclones and floods came—wiping out palm groves and settlements—Omanis also took to the sea. Repatriated monies from migrants helped finance new irrigation channels and expand Arab settlements into marginal lands, but the threat of silting water channels and drought made for precarious livelihoods. The plentiful rain in coastal East Africa must have been a welcome relief to Arabian migrants. In Zanzibar, clove mania led to the confiscating and repurposing of farmland in the 1830s. A disastrous hurricane in 1872 destroyed substantial portions of the clove crop and undermined the sultan’s independence. On the mainland, people pursuing the lucrative ivory trade changed elephant ecologies: herd populations, habitats, and dispersal. In 1875, Livingstone’s biographer suggested that 44,000 elephants a year were killed to supply England with ivory.46 While not all of these elephants were from East Africa, the demand for cheaper tusks created a moving East African ivory frontier, which encouraged hunters to travel deeper into the continent. Some Indian Ocean migrants and their dependents settled alongside Africans in the interior, and some carved out their own small communities. They planted the trees and field crops they wanted to feed themselves. They spread rice cultivation into the central African lake regions and the Congo River’s tributaries. People living in western Tanzania still associate mango trees with early Arab settlers.
THE WESTERN INDIAN OCEAN, NEW SOURCES, AND ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK
Buying Time uses a unique set of sources to complement and build on histories of East Africa and Arabia. By connecting the regions of the western Indian Ocean, this book argues for a more synthetic view of the processes that set people and goods in motion in the nineteenth century. An oceanic perspective has always helped explain the history of East Africa, but an oceanic turn in the approach to history—what some have called a “new thalassology”—in the first decade of the twenty-first century has made it easier to assess connections between distant regions through the sea.47 The earliest twentieth-century histories of East Africa posited that the Indian Ocean was a source of “invaders” who “exploited” the region.48 Important classic works noted the role of Indian Ocean trade networks for coastal entrepôts linked to trade and production in the African interior.49 Some scholarship specified the role of “Arabs” (loosely defined) from the Indian Ocean as oppositional to Europeans in Africa, missing the opportunity to describe both groups as part of a broader regional historical trajectory.50 Close study of coastal societies revealed waves of immigration from both the sea and the interior that shaped political discourse and rebellion on the eve of European colonization, and Africans from the interior shaped forms of labor on long-distance trade to and from the coast.51 While many of the historical actors had ties to distant shores, and these regional histories acknowledge the role of the ocean as a source of trade goods or migrants, they do not cross it.
A willingness to cross the sea and engage the Indian Ocean as an organizing framework also deepens our understanding of the history of Arabia. The initial histories of Oman deemphasized oceanic connections, while more recent work on the nineteenth century has focused on the Muscat-Zanzibar nexus in terms of trade and British imperial politics.52 The historian Nile Green disaggregated “the Middle East” into three arenas, one of which is the Indian Ocean. (The others are the Mediterranean Sea and Inner Asia.) A benefit of this formulation, he argues, is “bringing Africa into view as a crucial component in the development of Middle Eastern societies.”53 Certainly recent excellent work on Africans in Arabia shows the merit of this approach.54 Buying Time works from both the Arabian and African shores of the western Indian Ocean to show how the movement of people between them was a crucial component of the development of both regions in the nineteenth century. Within histories of the Indian Ocean in the imperial age, India, as a subimperial power, and Indians moving within “greater India” have been prominent.55 Hadrami Arabs have received the most attention as an Arabian diaspora.56 While these groups certainly figure into our story, the focus of this work will be primarily on the broad social array of Omani Arabs and Africans in western Indian Ocean networks that stretched into continental hinterlands.
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While this new thalassology adds an oceanic perspective, new sources make it easier to trace the movements of people across this broad, complicated region. These new sources include thousands of Arabic business contracts—sales, mortgages, and promissory notes—that have been sitting—uncatalogued and untranslated—in the Zanzibar archives for over 130 years.57 These documents record the activities of Africans, Arabs, and Indians within social and financial networks—networks that included the caravan stations of East Africa and the oasis villages of interior Arabia. The unique information in this archive reveals new and important details about the Indian Ocean’s past. First, these documents show complex variations on the financial transactions that underwrote ivory trading and mortgaged property—in Arabia, on the eastern coast of Africa, and in the African interior. Second, they list names, genealogies, statuses, and clan names of a wide variety of people—Africans, Indians, and Arabs; men and women; free and slave—who bought, sold, and mortgaged property in the nineteenth century. These genealogies illustrate the vast diversity of actors involved in these transactions. Third, the documents were created outside colonial and European influence and adhere to long-standing Islamic legal forms, but they also exhibit local inflections. Each deed provides a snapshot of an interconnected world before European colonialism.
The challenge of these documents has been to provide sufficient context to bring them to life. On the one hand, these transaction records have provided nuanced backstories for known individuals like Juma bin Salim. Starting from an interesting deed, on the other hand, I have been fortunate to fill in details of overlooked actors in Indian Ocean history by turning to nineteenth-century colonial archives, travelers’ accounts, missionary journals, Swahili biographies, and Omani scholars. I also gathered family histories by following the routes that the deeds set into motion: up and down the Swahili coast, across the old caravan route to Lake Tanganyika, and to the capital and interior towns of Oman. These sources and methods cannot account, however, for more informal credit networks or arrangements that were never registered. Indeed, the source base is slanted toward those who relied on Indian creditors. During the 1860s and 1870s changes to consular courts and to the definition of who was a British subject meant that Hindu and Muslim Indian businesspeople brought their documents to be registered at the consulate. Fortunately, some of these were decades old so that it becomes possible to reconstruct a range of social worlds from the 1840s and, occasionally, earlier. The breadth of the archive makes clear that throughout the nineteenth century a wide variety of people engaged in these transactions. These exciting new sources provide a way to understand the uses of credit and debt, to see previously overlooked groups, and to map individuals into Indian Ocean circuits.
This book is organized around nine chapters. It begins in Arabia, examining the conditions in Oman during the first decades of the nineteenth century. Chapter 1 argues that a novel combination of environmental, social, and political factors influenced Arab immigration to East Africa. Drought and political disturbances that aligned with periods of intense migration demonstrate that emigrants from the interior of Oman left their villages as a temporizing strategy. These migrants dealt with challenges such as drought, water courses running dry, and palm groves dying, with the seemingly temporary solution of transoceanic migration. This movement was made easier by the Omani sultan’s relocation to East Africa in the 1830s. Omani Arab rule in Zanzibar helped formalize a commercial culture, and chapter 2 analyzes the Arabic business documents that comprise the heart of this book by looking at the 1840s. These documents record agreements between buyers and sellers, creditors and debtors, and each one reflects the enmeshed social and economic relations in the port city of Zanzibar, even as they implicate a broader Indian Ocean seascape.
The third chapter details the enmeshed politics of Zanzibar and Muscat, especially during the rule of Said bin Sultan al-Busaidi (r. 1804–56) and the period after his death. His