Buying Time. Thomas F. McDow
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sail were incorporated into a highly regulated labor regime, controlled by a set of British laws called the Asiatic Articles. By 1855, as historian Janet Ewald notes, British merchant ships employed as many as twelve thousand lascars under the Asiatic Articles, 60 percent of whom were from India.39 Serangs oversaw all these men and kept a certain kind of rough order onboard. As a serang, Maqame would have been a skilled negotiator, an experienced traveler, and a comfortable visitor in many ports. Because of this, Maqame represents an unusual category—the indigenous cosmopolitan—and his land sale in 1845 implies a strategy of mobility in the face of increasing land pressure on the WaTumbatu and WaHadimu. His strategy may have been possible because of his relatively high status in the maritime world of the western Indian Ocean.
Sales of property and credit derived from mortgage-like arrangements were crucial to accessing mobility across the western Indian Ocean. Two more of Jairam Shivji’s financial deals in the 1840s illustrate this point. Both arrangements involve Ali Muhammad al-Busaidi, the man who sold the shamba with the slaves attached. In July 1845, a month after selling his shamba, Ali bin Muhammad al-Busaidi sold his house in Zanzibar and the adjoining property to Jairam Shivji for $400. On the day he sold his house, he agreed to rent it from Jairam Shivji for $40 per year. Ali bin Muhammad’s actions, written in two documents, demonstrate a business logic that challenged Islam ideals. They also provide an important window into Zanzibar society at that time.
The deed of transaction makes clear that this mud and mortar house and the adjacent land were surrounded by property owned by prominent individuals. Jairam Shivji already owned the house to the west. To the north was the house of Humud bin Sayf bin Msellem, a young clove grower who would later become a close advisor to two sultans. The Banyan Hari, presumably a merchant, owned the property to the east. In the south was empty land that belonged to Sulayman bin Hamed al-Busaidi, the long-standing governor of Zanzibar, a large landowner, and one of the most powerful men in East Africa.40 Other bordering properties belonged to the Indian Hima, whose son would become a prominent landlord.
Why would someone sell a house and rent it back? Such a maneuver allowed the property owner to receive cash (in this case, $400) and then pay a portion of this over time. In Ali bin Muhammad’s arrangement, he would have paid the value of the house in rent after ten years. Arrangements like this allowed those with fixed property to capitalize their assets. By completing two separate transactions with two different contracts, one also avoided the Islamic prohibitions on interest. From Jairam Shivji’s perspective, the rent served as interest on the $400 he had granted. This kind of double contract would become an increasingly common method of generating credit in East Africa, especially when paired with a redeemable sale, in which the original owner could buy back the property after a fixed period of time. These deals financed the ivory and clove trades for people of varying social classes. An understanding of these debt arrangements and the mobility they engendered can be achieved through close study of Arabic business documents in Zanzibar.
AN ARCHIVE OF TRANSACTIONS
Business deeds fill several volumes within the Zanzibar archives, and they detail more than two thousand transactions that span the nineteenth century. The languages of these documents reflect underlying commercial forms and Indian processes: the vast majority of them were written in Arabic; a substantial number are in Gujarati; and a much smaller number are in English. Although some deeds describe partnerships or the settling of estates, most directly relate to the flow of cash and credit. These documents clarify the terms of sales and the conditions under which creditors supplied money. They describe the security or collateral involved (if any) and specify the terms and time frame of repayment. The length of these documents varies from a few lines of text to several pages of subclauses. The collection, as a whole, offers a portrait of the interconnected world of the Indian Ocean. While most of the documents were written in Zanzibar, they implicate property and people who traveled far across the ocean and into the interiors of Africa and Arabia.
“Said bin ‘Umar bin Muhammad bin Salim al-Kharūsi acknowledged that he owes Wala bin Banji al-Hindi one hundred frasila and twenty frasila pure ivory in the measurement [weight] of Zanzibar frasila.” 41 So begins a typical contract written in Arabic, following the precepts of Islamic legal practice. Said bin ‘Umar, the borrower, stated his obligation to deliver ivory to Wala Banji, the creditor (and one of the agents of the customs master), within a period of one year, from the date of the contract, 10 Dhu al-Qa’da 1293 (November 26, 1876). This type of document is among the most common written Islamic agreements, an acknowledgment or iqrār, and this type is well-represented in the Zanzibar collection. These documents acknowledge a debt or obligation, and they take their name from the Arabic verb root q-r-r in its fourth form (
One of the most striking aspects of Islamic contract law, however, is that written agreements are not required for any transaction. Theoretically, a written contract is only valid after the oral testimonies of qualified witnesses verify its content.47 Thus, written agreements in Islamic commercial life have had an uneasy history. The Quran explicitly instructs people to write down their agreements and to make contracts: “Believers, when you contract a debt for a fixed period, put it in writing. Let a scribe write it down for you with fairness; no scribe should refuse to write as God has taught him. . . . So do not fail to put your debts in writing, be they small or big, together with the date of payment. This is more than just in the sight of God; it ensures accuracy in testifying and is the best way to remove all doubt.” 48 This injunction reflects the transactional relations and the commercial world of seventh-century Arabia, and it lays the groundwork for prohibiting two Islamic commercial practices: usury (riba in Arabic, which means an increase with an implication of illegal means, such as bribery, profiteering, and fraud) and speculation (gharar in Arabic, which means risk, hazard, or jeopardy).49
The Quranic injunction to write contracts notwithstanding, early Islamic legal theory emphasized the primacy of witnesses’ oral testimony and downplayed the role of documentary evidence.50 Oral testimony and the qualification of witnesses have been central to Islamic legal epistemology. Despite the tension between oral testimony and written documents, however, paper contracts have been fundamental to Islamic commercial practice from the earliest days.51 These contracts rested—much like oral agreements—on the testimony of witnesses. Thus, while written documents shadowed testimonial evidence, scholars and practitioners linked these by writing formularies and templates that only had to be witnessed to be valid.52
Signing formulae arose so that witnesses could state their acknowledgment of the agreement. And written documents increasingly followed boilerplate texts to avoid standard objections and pitfalls, while still remaining legally sound. Getting the details correct in such documents would guarantee that transactions were legal and rights were respected. In the case of property sales, for instance, deeds were required to list the owners of all adjoining properties, because these people had a right to preempt the sale under Islamic law. These forms and contracts were easily replicated with the formularies that allowed people to create contracts that met Islamic legal standards.53 Parties to these agreements wanted them to be legally impeccable, and formularies were especially important to non-Muslims who wanted to ensure the documents’ validity in Muslim