date palms in the Ma‘awīl and Sumayl valleys.65 At that time the Sumayl valley was rapidly expanding its production of fard dates for the United States market. In 1875, an American visitor to Muscat estimated that six million pounds of dates traveled from Muscat to New York that year.66 Farmers in Sumayl discovered that they could sell all the dates that they could harvest, and the value of this export peaked in the 1880s.67 Thus, while we have insufficient data to quantify the effects of a storm that toppled five thousand palms, it is likely that the loss of thousands of trees producing the region’s most valuable export devastated some residents.
In the following season—from 1877 to 1878—heavy floods overran “the whole of Oman,” and the country’s date crop was almost entirely lost. The environmentally marginal Sharqiya region was hardest hit, with an estimated crop loss of 90 percent. Surrounding districts suffered almost as much. By harvest time, the specter of famine was clear, and the British resident in Muscat expected distress and possible political disturbances.68 While political grievances simmered, some people whose lives depended on date farming in the 1870s made the same decision as those who faced the catastrophic drought in Nizwa the 1840s: they left their homes. In Muscat, observers reported a steady emigration to Zanzibar. Between 1877 and 1878, an estimated one thousand Arabs decamped in response to the poor date harvest.69
In March 1885, a cyclone hit central Oman, inundating villages and settlements. A flash flood ripped down the Sumayl valley, destroyed thousands of date trees, and rendered homeless the poorest inhabitants who lived in makeshift shelters of matted palm leaves. The recovery from such destruction was slow. Nine months later, a visitor still found wrecked houses, ruined date gardens, and many headless palm trees broken or bent to the ground.70 The strong international market in fard dates from Sumayl may have been a saving grace. In response to demand in the 1870s, farmers in Sumayl had greatly increased the number of date trees they planted. The loss of thousands of trees was proportionately smaller than the preceding decade’s loss. Still, Sumayl producers exhibited some resilience, probably because of the thriving production and high prices of dates. Throughout the 1880s, the date trade to the United States was at its peak, averaging more than $100,000 per year. The producers earned about 80 percent of the export value.71 Unfortunately for most Omanis, the lucrative, particularistic market for fard dates from Sumayl had no cognates in other sectors of the economy. As the nineteenth century closed, Sumayl fell more in line with the rest of the country, as both local political disturbances and a North American recession significantly diminished export earnings.72 This set the groundwork for waves of emigration to East Africa that would continue until the 1960s.
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What conclusions should we draw from the people of Oman’s relationship to their environment in the nineteenth century? The sometimes tenuous balance that Omanis sought in maintaining their date groves and their livelihoods faced the same challenges in the nineteenth century as they had in previous periods. Droughts and floods were endemic. What was strikingly different about this era, however, was that Indian Ocean emigration was an option for many more people than it had ever been before. A close connection between the interior of Oman and Zanzibar and other East African locales became firmly established during this period. For example, Nasir bin Ahmad al-Riyami escaped drought in the eighteenth century by moving his family from the village of Al Jede’iya to the larger settlement of upper Ibra (Ibrā‘ ‘Alaya). After Said bin Sultan had paved the way to East Africa in the early nineteenth century, however, Nasir bin Ahmad led his family there in the 1820s, and his family prospered.73 Africa became a refuge and a source of wealth. The degree to which environmental difficulties prompted people to move is hard to isolate, yet the extreme droughts of the 1840s and the destructive, variable rain patterns of the 1870s both preceded periods of Arab migration. Desiccated water sources and ruined date groves put individuals and families in precarious conditions. When their homes and farms were unsustainable, and an absent sultan was unable to lead prayers for rain, Omani Arabs could temporize. Moves to the Arabian coast and to East Africa bought time for droughts to end, rain to come, and land to revive.
Following historian Claude Markowitz’s terminology, this movement should be seen as a pattern of circulation.74 Some Arabs did settle in East Africa, but emigration began as a response to particular factors in Oman, and nothing suggests that individuals left Arabia with no intent of returning. As we shall see, some of these migrants used wealth gained abroad to invest in their homelands. Some renovated aflaj or built new ones, while others underwrote the construction of impressive houses. Far from being isolated, the interior of Arabia continued to be connected to the Indian Ocean world, not just through the circulation of goods, but also through the circulation of people, their wealth, and the religious and political ideologies that motivated them. By understanding the temporizing strategies that individuals pursued in the face of difficult conditions, we can appreciate the contingent nature of mobility in the western Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century. The evidence of this mobility can be found among the former halwa-makers of the caravan routes of central Africa, and in the business contracts that these men and women from drought-stricken Nizwa and other places wrote in Zanzibar. The sweetness of halwa must wait, and it is to these deeds and the world they describe that we now turn.
2
The Customs Master and Customs of Credit in Zanzibar
WHEN PASSENGERS DISEMBARKED in Zanzibar from the booms and buggalas that sailed the western Indian Ocean in the early nineteenth century, they found a city in transition. Those who had recently left the interior of Arabia and had never sailed with the monsoon may have been overwhelmed by the hubbub of the port, or just happy to be on dry land, and they may have been too disorientated even to notice what was going on around them. On the other hand, the seasoned sailors who made this journey every year or two would certainly have noticed differences in the city. Zanzibar had begun to transform from the relatively simple fishing settlement of a few decades earlier to the biggest and most prosperous town on the east coast of Africa. Zanzibar was becoming a commercial center from which networks of indebtedness reached across the Indian Ocean and far into the East African interior. This chapter examines the formalization of Zanzibar’s commercial culture by unpacking the Arabic business documents that underwrote the city’s far-flung credit networks. It focuses on the 1840s, the earliest decade for which Arabic business contracts are available, to help reveal the enmeshed social and economic networks of Zanzibar.
Among the thousands of Arabic language contracts that have been preserved in Zanzibar, only a small number deal with the period before the late 1860s. This is a result of the process of registering documents (as detailed in chapter 7), though the difference between official, bureaucratic senses of time and the sense of time embedded in these contracts meant that some creditors submitted documents that were decades old. The documents considered in this chapter are thus a subset of a vast collection that informs the whole book. As such, these examples from the 1840s stand in for what were inevitably a great number of transactions that were completed (and thus not disputed), lost, or never registered. Contracts and agreements that were not resolved were more likely to be registered. In any case, the sample that remains makes clear that a dynamic Indian Ocean economy included a wide variety of mobile economic actors who used Arabic language transactions to forward their own goals in Zanzibar, the place that welcomed the most travelers from the Omani interior.
The journey to Zanzibar from Oman took a couple of weeks with favorable monsoon winds. As the dhows made their way from Muscat or Sur, they sailed close to the coast. The passengers may have stopped at Mogadishu, a place Ibn Batuta had visited in 1331, and even if they had not stopped, they certainly would have seen the minarets of four of the largest mosques that were visible ten miles from the shore.1 The views of Mogadishu and Barawa on the northern Swahili coast would have been somewhat familiar, as these cities resembled the coastal cities of Arabia and Persia, with low, square, flat-roofed houses built of stone and mud.2
