Buying Time. Thomas F. McDow
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find new connections between nodes.13 This study attempts to do both. The Arabic transaction records in the Zanzibar Archives describe a type of process geography, a world of credit and debt. This information is embedded in Arabic contracts about assets and people, from Arabia to central Africa. Commodity chains (like those of ivory) and foodways (such as the production, consumption, and social practice around the Omani sweetmeat halwa) have spatial dimensions and dispersed geographies in this Indian Ocean world. By focusing on debt—both as an economic relationship and as part of a network of social relationships—this book describes human mobilities and a unified geography by pursuing connections across boundaries of race, ethnicity, status, class, and religion. This book considers time, debt, mobility, kinship, and environment to show how individuals took advantage of credit and mobility to temporize and to reshape their lives.
This book concentrates on the hinterlands of the western Indian Ocean, during the long nineteenth century. In European terms, we can define this period as spanning the French Revolution to World War I. This era encapsulates the Anglo-French rivalry in the Indian Ocean; British attempts to gain more control over India and its dependencies, both before and after 1857; and the explosion of colonization in the last decades of the century. While such global processes affected many people in this story, local events governed their lives in more profound ways. In eastern Arabia, local rulers chose either to accommodate or to challenge Wahhabi expansion, and rulers in Muscat, Oman, struggled to shore up their power in the face of challenges from their families and coreligionists. Omani sultans sought to balance this opposition with cooperation—both commercial and political allegiances—with British officials and their Indian subjects.
On the African coast and in the interior, Zanzibar’s economic boom made the island an important node. Local trade in cloth, gunpowder, ivory, and slaves reconfigured polities and practices near and far. Formal Omani rule in Zanzibar was a novelty during this period. Said bin Sultan al-Busaidi brought the East African coast under his control, moved his court to Zanzibar in the 1830s, and ruled dominions in Arabia and Africa until his death in 1856. His sons became sultans in Oman and Zanzibar, and their rivalries and their reluctant British clientship paved the way for international treaties that limited the slave trade and later ceded territory and created colonial sovereignty.
The western Indian Ocean is the stage for the action in this book, and it includes not just the cosmopolitan port cities long connected to maritime trading networks but also the distant hinterlands of Arabia and Africa. This area includes the rugged mountain-to-desert landscapes of eastern Arabia, the Indian Ocean seascape, the fertile islands of Zanzibar and Pemba, the mangrove-guarded coasts of East Africa, the central plateau of the eastern African mainland, the Rift Valley lakes, and the tributaries that pushed the Congo River to the Atlantic Ocean. Remarkably, by the end of the nineteenth century, this diverse geography had some things in common. Arabs from Oman and Swahili speakers from the coast inhabited trading outposts across the east central African plateau, built dhows on the shores of the Great Lakes, and navigated the Congo River. Africans from the interior lived on the east coast and traveled—some as slaves, others free—to coastal and interior Arabia. Human mobility connected interior regions to global trade networks, expanded the Islamic ecumene, and broadened the boundaries of the Swahiliphone world.
Throughout this period and across these spaces, this book focuses on five factors—time, debt, mobility, kinship, and environment—to elucidate the patterns and disjunctures around which people in the western Indian Ocean structured their lives.
TIME
The notion of “buying time” is an organizing metaphor for this book. It frames both historical contingency and the many time-mediated exchanges that were vital to the region. Buying time is shorthand for a particular type of historical agency: temporizing. To temporize is to adopt a course of action to conform to circumstances; to wait for a more favorable moment; or to negotiate to gain time.14 By seeing the actions of Indian Ocean actors in this framework, we recognize the limited choices and difficult decisions they had to make, often with incomplete knowledge.15 This also allows us to focus on people of middling and low status, such as impoverished migrants, freed slaves, and nonsheikhly Arabs, and recognize that even sultans and tribal leaders had to make decisions between an uncomfortable status quo and a possible threatening future. In the western Indian Ocean, slaves often had more power than an outside observer would expect, and sultans often had less. Western Indian Ocean actors used temporizing strategies to improve their circumstances, enhance their autonomy, and increase their security. The strategies for buying time provide a lens to view the actions and choices of individual actors to go along, to parley, and to see what would happen in a world of uncertain outcomes.
This approach preserves a sense of historical contingency that has often been overlooked in teleological approaches to the history of East Africa and Oman. Some Marxian and world-systems analyses have tended to treat economic processes, class formation, and European colonialism as foregone conclusions. Likewise, racial and ethnic categories that hardened in the violent politics of Zanzibar in the 1950s and 1960s have tended to cloud fluid identities from the previous century.16 The combination of these sets of arguments that map class and race ends up ignoring poor and low-status Arabs, outcast Indians, and African elite traders. If, as Isabel Hofmeyr has suggested, the Indian Ocean has become “the subaltern sea,” we need to employ a temporal approach that leaves room for agency and contingency as a wide range of actors created the interlinked Indian Ocean world.17
But what was “time” in the context of the western Indian Ocean? Jürgen Osterhammel reminds us that there were a multitude of methods for reckoning time in the nineteenth century, and prior to the nineteenth century time was far from “universal.”18 Then, in 1884, the same year that the Congress of Berlin met to divide up Africa, the Prime Meridian Conference met in Washington, DC, to divide the world into time zones and to create a universal day that began at midnight.19 This movement was tied to technological innovations like railways, telegraphs, and steamships, which required something more than nonstandardized local times.20 Excellent recent histories of the movement to adopt a universal time narrate their stories beginning in the 1870s and emphasize the way various actors contested the imposition of new time schemes.21 The long history of movement and exchange in the Indian Ocean, however, had created many overlapping units for rendering time before the late nineteenth century. The monsoonal calendar governed ocean travel for millennia, and it created the seasonal rainfall patterns that dictated growing seasons. In the African mainland, dry season trading ventures set the stage for long-distance trade. The date harvesting cycle shaped the patterns of life in eastern Arabia, which stands outside the monsoon rainfall system. Consequently, the need for irrigation and shared water resources led to systems for measuring time with stars and to elaborate units of time—the smallest was one-sixteenth of a second—to measure the water flow in irrigation canals.22
In East Africa, the time of day was measured in hours from the sunrise, so that noon was “saa sita (six hours).” Islamic time had a lunar calendar that included months for fasting and pilgrimage, but the start of these months was locally determined by moon sightings. Likewise, the Islamic calendar did not synchronize with other natural, seasonal calendars, so for instance, Ramadan could occur during Oman’s date harvest one year, slip back through the “agricultural” year, and not coincide with the date harvest again for thirty-three years.
While nineteenth-century technologies helped define parameters of time and space, multiple time scales persisted in the western Indian Ocean. Jeremy Prestholdt has shown that, when the sultan of Zanzibar installed a clock tower in the 1880s, he “domesticated” the clock by setting it to Swahili time, the local standard, in which one o’clock is the first hour after sunrise. Thus he “did not Europeanize time in Zanzibar; rather he adapted the European timepiece to Zanzibari perceptions of time.”23 Erik Gilbert has further demonstrated that dhow travel on monsoon winds was prominent until late in the twentieth century. The flexible logic of dhow sailing—as opposed to the rigid schedule of steamships—allowed dhows to compete on favorable terms with freighters for coastal cargoes.24 Given the ways that those in the western Indian Ocean incorporated or challenged “universal” or “bureaucratic” time, what does it mean to say that people in the western Indian Ocean and its