Buying Time. Thomas F. McDow
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Ladha Damji followed Islamic contractual prescriptions was so that they could appeal to jurists (qadis) to help enforce their claims. Qadis themselves sometime turned to the local rulers for enforcement. Punishments included fines, confiscations, and imprisonment.36 In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, British consular courts in Indian Ocean port cities came to assume an outsized role in settling disputes that involved Indian merchants, which eventually reshaped commercial law and practice in the Indian Ocean by the early twentieth century.37 These enforcement mechanisms, however, depended on the debtors being close at hand. Debtors could escape enforcement in a region marked by mobility.
MOBILITY
Time, debt, and mobility expanded the boundaries of the Indian Ocean world in the nineteenth century, and mobility features as the third major theme of this book. The Indian Ocean was a world in motion from earliest times because monsoon winds made long-distance travel possible. Jewish merchants in old Cairo traded and settled in western India in the eleventh century, Ibn Batuta sailed the breadth of the ocean in the fourteenth century, and Vasco da Gama found mariners on the East African coast who could guide him to western India at the end of the fifteenth. From the Hadhramaut in southern Arabia, generations of sayids traveled and settled as teachers, scholars, and advisors at court in distant Malaysia and Indonesia.38 From Malacca to Kilwa, cosmopolitan port cities have long been a hallmark of the region.
The nineteenth century, however, introduced new forms of mobility and new circuits of movement that disrupted people at every rank in Indian Ocean societies, from sultans to slaves. The introduction of steamships and opening of the Suez Canal increased the speed and routes of sea travel in the Indian Ocean, but older forms of transport persisted and allowed poorer people to cover great distances. Juma bin Salim was born in the Omani interior and died on the banks of the Congo River. Although it is difficult to reconstruct his early movements with precision, travel from Nizwa to Muscat required a hundred-mile trek walking or on camelback, sailing more than 2,500 nautical miles from Muscat to Zanzibar, and, once he reached the African continent, another eight-hundred-mile trek on foot to his settlement in the Congo. For his part, Ladha Damji had been born impoverished in Kutch on the west coast of India before making his way to Zanzibar and clawing his way to the top of the region’s financial elite. One Omani sultan moved his capital to Zanzibar, and his heirs went as far as Bombay and London as exiles and supplicants, biding their time in pursuit of succeeding him. The slave trade forced Africans from the interior to the Indian Ocean islands, Arabia, India, and even the Americas, and indenture transported Indians to the Mascarene islands and southern Africa. In turn, many freed slaves managed their own mobility, and their skillful manipulations of debt and time made them part of a larger group of Indian Ocean actors who populated the East African interior.
Juma bin Salim was part of a much larger movement that made upland East Africa a far shore of the Indian Ocean. Classic histories of the Indian Ocean have marginalized Africa in the early modern period, but it is impossible to overlook the movement of people into and out of Africa in the nineteenth century. The pursuit of ivory and slaves attracted traders from Arabia and the coast most prominently, but Comorians, Baluchis, and even Khojas traveled and lived in the new commercial centers that sprang up in this period on the eastern African plateau, near the Great Lakes, and on the Congo River.
The mobility of Indian Ocean actors in the African interior has had profound long-term consequences across the region, yet scholars have given inadequate attention to this process. While debt enabled their mobility to far-flung destinations, they did not always return to repay their creditors. Scholars have frequently fallen prey to a kind of coastal chauvinism that privileges the coast in the Indian Ocean world. Accounts frequently assume that all those who traveled to the interior did so to enrich themselves and return to their own distant homes or at least the shores of the Indian Ocean. These circumstances were true for a small subset of successful migrants, and it is clear that others repatriated wealth or invested in their home areas. But these cases overshadow the degree to which Indian Ocean actors were able to establish themselves in the trading depots of East Africa or in small settlements along the caravan routes and achieve a degree of wealth and autonomy that would not have been possible at home. By building local allegiances and marrying African women, Indian Ocean men became heads of polygynous households with many clients and agricultural holdings. Some enjoyed privileged access to trade, and many of those of lower status in Indian Ocean hierarchies—recently freed slaves, nonsheikhly Arabs, former Baluchi mercenaries—found greater degrees of freedom. While they might move beyond the reach of their creditors, they remained part of an expanding Indian Ocean milieu, and some status distinctions—like the Arab disdain of nontribal bayāsirah—traveled too. Nineteenth-century mobility and the commodity-focused credit that underwrote it brought Indians, Arabs, and Africans to new places on the Indian Ocean rim and its hinterland in much greater numbers than at any point in history. Assessing this mobility helps us balance both individual agency and the results of unintended consequences. If Juma bin Salim intended, at some point, to leave his plantations and trading hub and return with his dependents and his store of ivory to Zanzibar, settle his debts, and perhaps even go back to Oman, he died before he could do so. He ran out of time.
KINSHIP
Kinship was a vital factor in the organization of trade and mobility in the Indian Ocean. Likewise, trade and mobility led to the reconfiguration of family and broadened the purview of kin. Genealogy was a key strategy of self-representation in documents and, as a result of exogamous marriages, descent also became a discourse of belonging for Indian Ocean actors. Across the Indian Ocean, scholars have documented the family trees of rulers, descendants of the Prophet, and Sufi scholars, but new sources make it possible to reconstruct kin networks and clan memberships for other Indian Ocean actors.39
Although little evidence exists for us to see Juma bin Salim amid his own kin networks, he proudly listed three generations of paternal ancestors in a promissory note, and he established a household in the Congo with a Ugandan wife who helped oversee his ivory stores. Even from this limited information we can see how kinship functioned on two levels. The first level was an official genealogical one—the patrilineal line and clan—that created differences between people and ordered and legitimated a social order.40 On the second level, the idiom of kinship described connections to other people, and these connections or relationships could be used in certain circumstances. For Juma bin Salim, this was his African wife, and for others in East Africa these included maternal uncles and uterine brothers. Indeed, in the Indian Ocean world, the calculus of kinship was important. Said bin Salim al-Lamki was born on the Swahili coast to an Omani Arab father and a Malagasy mother. Said bin Salim served as the wali (governor) of Saadani on the Swahili coast before the sultan appointed him in 1857 to lead Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke on their expedition in search of the Nile. Burton was scaldingly dismissive of Said bin Salim al-Lamki’s obsession with kinship, complaining of Said’s “ignorance and apathy concerning all things but A. bin B., and B. bin C., who married his son D. to the daughter of E.” 41 But Said’s focus makes clear that genealogy, kinship, and marriage were vital. Birth and genealogy were tools that mobile Indian Ocean actors could use to establish new statuses and roles by calling on new categories of kin.42
Familial networks served as an infrastructure linking to production and reproduction in the western Indian Ocean. In her work on Indian networks between western India and East Africa, Hollian Wint challenges narrow conceptions of trading diasporas and static views of kinship to show the centrality of families and households. They were “neither peripheral to trading networks nor unchanging units within them, rather, they were at the core of trans-local connections and transformations.” 43 These transformations are clear when we see kinship as socially constructed and use it as a way to analyze social inequalities through gender, power, and difference. Within Arab families in East Africa, for example, family structures changed with mobility and new marriages, and in some cases these resulted in pronounced inequalities among kin.
ENVIRONMENT
Itinerant people in the western Indian Ocean reacted to environmental challenges and reshaped local ecologies.44 This book prioritizes environmental histories alongside human histories, heeding anthropologist Anna Tsing’s call to take seriously nonhuman actors, disturbance-based