Buying Time. Thomas F. McDow
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Oman, people bought time when they needed to buy water. The country’s interior needed elaborate irrigation schemes to make agriculture possible. The water was distributed by shares. Yet, while some people owned permanent shares, others bought shares in regular auctions. They were not, however, buying certain volumes of water. They were buying units of time, during which the water would flow into their channels.25
The Arabic contracts that people like Juma bin Salim used to acknowledge debt explicitly involved time. One subset of these documents suggests that individuals were literally buying time. Although Juma bin Salim did not put up collateral for his 1869 ivory deal, many others received credit by pledging houses or land, with an agreement to redeem them after a fixed period by paying in ivory. Others took part in bay‘ al-khiyār (optional, reversible sales) that gave the creditor rights to rent or usufruct for a fixed period of time, after which the original owner could withdraw the original sale. When clerks in Zanzibar copied these deeds—sometimes decades later—for the British consul, they often called the deeds “time sales.”
The Arabic documents also demonstrate the imposition of bureaucratic time, which was out of sync with time in the Islamic legal system. The deeds followed Islamic formularies, and the scribes recorded dates in the Arabic calendar. Time for redeemable sales was also measured in Arabic years. Yet the Islamic dates were much less important to the clerks who recorded them for British consular courts. Clerks duly noted, stamped, and indexed the documents by the date they were registered. Sometimes these documents were registered decades after the transactions took place. Juma bin Salim’s 1869 promissory note was registered at the consular court in 1888. This suggests that Juma bin Salim never satisfied this debt despite his promise to return in two years. Operating in and among these overlapping and unstable boundaries of time in the nineteenth century, the concept of “buying time” reflects the literal sense of some transactions, and it also metaphorically explains agency and historical contingency.
This book focuses on debt and mobility as temporizing strategies. Omani Arabs from nonsheikhly lines went overseas when they could no longer access irrigation water. Freed slaves sold property to join the caravan trade, and during their journeys they maneuvered among categories and statuses. Arabs, Africans, and other Indian Ocean actors who took to the caravan trails founded and populated settlements in mainland East Africa. Their opportunistic traveling took them to places where they could find personal autonomy and could attract clients of their own, while the distance from the coast loosened their ties to creditors. In Oman, tribal leaders played cat-and-mouse games with the sultan and his allies—parleying at times and attacking at others. These opportunities to strike, however, were organized through a financial interface—namely credit from Zanzibar—that shaped political tensions with the sultan. These temporizing strategies across the long axis of the western Indian Ocean demonstrate how the constrained agency of multiple actors worked to maintain an interconnected region.
FIGURE 0.2. Juma Merikani’s house in the Congo. From Verney Lovett Cameron, Across Africa (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1877).
DEBT
Notions of time are inextricably linked to the concepts of debt and indebtedness, a second core concept of this book. The anthropologist David Graeber has called debt “just an exchange that has not been brought to completion,” and it follows that what remains in that equation is time. And, as Graeber notes, the time between contracting a debt and repaying is when “just about everything interesting happens.”26 As Juma bin Salim’s two-year promise makes clear, debt was an essential part of acquiring ivory, and thus it was a vital link in a commodity chain that stretched from East African forests to Victorian parlors.27 In this way, ivory was similar to other natural products from the Indian Ocean world—cloves, copal, pearls, and dates—that the growth of global capitalism helped deliver to distant centers.28 The procurement and delivery of these goods around the Indian Ocean depended largely on Indian merchants, like Ladha Damji, who served as key creditors and intermediaries within commodity chains. It was credit and debt from these lenders that drove the commercial expansion of the Indian Ocean world in the nineteenth century.29
Assuming debt and accessing credit allowed people to take advantage of new opportunities in the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century, and they did so through contracts rooted in Islamic law. Juma bin Salim’s promissory note acknowledging his ivory debt to Ladha Damji represented one of many types of waraqa (literally paper) that were flexible instruments used to extend credit and confirm debts. Although non-Muslims like Ladha Damji used these documents widely, the writings followed well-known Islamic formulas so that they would be legitimate in the eyes of qadis (jurists). Thus, one of the goals of such contracts was to avoid the appearance of usury (ribā) because charging interest would invalidate the legality of the contract. Does this mean that merchants and moneylenders did not charge interest in the Indian Ocean?
While European observers in the nineteenth century claimed that merchants charged exorbitant interest rates—up to 100 percent—this was not true. The nature of the transactions, however, and the surviving documents make it difficult to determine the actual rates with precision. Certainly European traders paid interest at a rate that was eventually standardized to 9 percent in the 1860s.30 When financiers like Ladha Damji lent money to Muslims like Juma bin Salim, however, the interest was obscured through two separate transactions, both of which were legal. To begin, the financier advanced a certain value of trade goods—merikani cloth, trade beads, and other goods. In a separate transaction, like the one Juma bin Salim completed, the debtor acknowledged that he would deliver a certain value of goods at a future date. The “interest” was thus the discount between the value of goods advanced and the value of the payment promised. In the late 1850s Burton noted that secured loans included interest of 15 to 20 percent, and Livingstone reported in the 1870s that the rates were between 20 and 25 percent.31 Stanley, also writing in the 1870s, claimed that the effective interest was between 50 and 70 percent.32 The initial agreement may have been negotiated orally, and only the second contract was written down. In these cases, the “interest” was charged initially on the transaction so there was no compounding over time, and the debt could be ongoing.
Another common way to avoid the sin of interest was through a set of incomplete sales that created debt. These included optional sales (bay‘ al-khiyār) in which the seller could undo the sale by returning the sale price, and sales with pledged property (rahnan maqbuḍ). In both cases, the creditor would retain the right to the property sold, such as a house or a farm, and would profit from the rent on the house or the produce of the farm. One common version of this arrangement included the debtor renting his own house back from the creditor. In this case, the sale of the house from A to B would be written in one contract, and a separate contract would be issued for B to rent the house from A at a fixed rate each month. In this case, the “interest” was the rent and could, in theory, continue indefinitely. These optional sales, bay‘ khiyār, became a way for many different actors with even a small amount of property to leverage themselves into positions to participate in and profit from the lucrative trade booms of the Indian Ocean world.
In all of these cases, indebtedness created a set of obligations that mirrored patron-client relationships elsewhere in the Islamic world. In the western Indian Ocean, as on the caravan trails of the Sahara, commercial dealings did not depend entirely on faith or ethnicity.33 The portfolios of merchants represented the diversity of peoples present in port cities. In Zanzibar, debtors included Arabs of many social strata, Hindu and Muslim Indians, indigenous Zanzibaris, Swahili, mainland Africans, and enslaved people. In this sense, debts created overlapping networks of obligation that implicated both sultans and slaves. The sultans in Oman and Zanzibar were, after all, chronically in debt to their customs masters. Within these networks of patronage and obligation, creditors cultivated clients to build their own reputations and firms while clients and debtors sought to balance powerful patrons with their own autonomy.34
When the autonomy of clients as debtors threatened to undercut the loan, Indian Ocean creditors did not rely solely on reputation mechanisms.35