sums to foreign trading interests to finance their operations in Zanzibar. Jairam had three main groups of debtors: the Arab rulers of Zanzibar, American and European trading firms, and a large group of everyday people, including Indians, Arabs, and Swahilis in Zanzibar and on the mainland.
Jairam Shivji’s firm advanced large sums of money to the al-Busaidi rulers in Zanzibar. The al-Busaidi state in Oman and Zanzibar had a long history of relying on credit from Hindu Banyan commercial houses. In the eighteenth century, firms from Kutch, in western India, lent the Omani ruler Sultan bin Ahmad al-Busaidi warships in exchange for protection and favorable commercial treatment.17 As Zanzibar grew in commercial importance, however, the customs duties collected on imports and exports had high income potential. Because the al-Busaidi rulers had relatively little wealth, they sought cash up front by farming the customs to powerful, cash-rich firms like Jairam Shivji’s. This practice—functionally the same as tax farming—was a very common way to raise cash for Muslim rulers or state treasuries.18 Tax farming entailed selling the right to collect taxes over a specific time period to an individual or private firm. The person or firm who collected the taxes kept them as profit. Jairam Shivji farmed the customs both in Zanzibar (after 1819) and on the mainland (after 1837).19 The sultan had the guaranteed income, and Jairam and his firm enforced the customs collection and kept the profits.
During al-Busaidi rule, the finances of the ruler and the state were intimately connected, and the customs master was central to providing credit to the sultan and his government. When Said bin Sultan needed to raise additional funds to pacify resistance to his rule in Oman, he turned to the customs master. In 1851, Jairam Shivji gave Said a year’s advance against the customs receipts, and Said went to Muscat with MT$500,000. He later wrote to Jairam for an additional MT$50,000.20 Said used these funds to raise forces to quell the rebellion and to buy the loyalty of various leaders. These debts passed on to Seyyid Said’s heirs, and they would be one source of ongoing tension between Zanzibar and Muscat after his death.
American and European merchants also depended on credit in Zanzibar to finance their trading ventures. American whalers’ early efforts at trading in Zanzibar floundered because of the poor circulation of credit. They could not secure cargoes because they had no way to advance capital to themselves. By the 1840s, however, Indian firms like that of Jairam Shivji provided capital to American and European merchants on a regular basis. These loans were unsecured, but they had generous interest rates to provide Jairam Shivji and other lenders with good returns on their investments.21 In 1851, an experienced American agent explained to his superior back in Massachusetts why he had decided to keep MT$25,000 of Jairam Shivji’s money on a permanent loan. First, he considered the capital an “absolute necessity” to have funds on hand, and second, he noted that borrowing it from the powerful customs master would bring certain commercial advantages in Zanzibar, including collecting on debts and finding suitable business partners.22 They believed that the customs master would have a strong interest in the firm’s success. By the 1860s and early 1870s, Jairam Shivji’s firm had advanced loans of MT$665,000 to American, British, and French companies.23 These infusions of credit went along with commercial treaties and informal alliances between commercial houses to help build international trade in Zanzibar. The cloth and beads coming from North America, Europe, and South Asia were necessary to meet the demands of the East African market. The peddlers, traders, and commodity producers in these markets were not foreign merchants or state officials, but a diverse group of Africans, Arabs, and Indians who were part of an expanding Indian Ocean world in the 1840s.
The 1840s was a dynamic period in the economic history of Zanzibar. Seyyid Said bin Sultan signed commercial treaties with the United States (1833), Great Britain (1839), and France (1844) that resulted in each sending consuls to represent their national and trading interests at Seyyid Said’s court in Zanzibar. In this period after the Napoleonic Wars, the British and the French were engaged in strategic maneuvering in the western Indian Ocean, and they also heralded more forceful global approaches to so-called free trade, as best exemplified in the first Opium Wars (1839–1842). The letters and records that these consuls created are invaluable historical sources for Zanzibar and the western Indian Ocean, but they emphasize diplomatic and commercial relations of the powerful, and obscure the actions of the Africans, Arabs, and Indians that made up most of the population of Zanzibar.
A trove of Arabic-language documents in the Zanzibar National Archive provides important sources for the history of East Africa. These materials demonstrate how credit markets in Zanzibar connected much of the western Indian Ocean, from the interior of Oman to the interior of East Africa. These documents—preserved for more than one hundred years—reveal important new details about the Indian Ocean past. They record thousands of sales, loans, and transactions between Africans, Arabs, and Indians. These documents present multiple variations on the complex financial transactions that allowed people to buy time: they underwrote the ivory trade; and they mortgaged property in Arabia, on the east African coast, and in the interior of Africa. These sources are unparalleled in their listing of individual names, genealogies, statuses, and clan names of a wide variety of people (Africans, Indians, and Arabs; men and women; free and slave) who bought, sold, and mortgaged property in the nineteenth century. They also provide insight into the world of the judges, scribes, and clerks who created them. Finally, the individuals who created these documents did so outside of any colonial or European-influenced sphere. As noted earlier and explained in Chapter 7, their registration occurred during a time of increasing British activity, but the documents were produced in a different milieu. The writers adhered to long-standing Islamic legal forms, and they inflected them with local usage. Each of these transactions provides a snapshot of an interconnected world before European colonialism.24 As a whole, these exciting new sources allow us to understand the inner workings of credit and debt, to see previously overlooked groups, and to map individuals into Indian Ocean circuits.
The dozen documents that have survived from the 1840s give a sense of the regional economy in transition, especially regarding the value of land. The material also points to a wide variety of actors. A very small number of wealthy people sold large farms—some with slaves attached—or houses. In most of the transactions, small holders sold their property to the customs master, who may or may not have been speculating on the land.
Jairam Shivji was the biggest buyer and creditor, participating in twelve of the fourteen transactions from the 1840s. While he was an important creditor to foreign merchants and to the sultan, he also transacted business with a wide variety of other people in Zanzibar. The range of people involved in transactions in the 1840s included an indigenous man from Tumbatu, freed slaves of early Omani migrants, a wife of a Swahili notable, and Omani families established in Zanzibar, including members of the sultan’s clan. Most people sold agricultural land (shamba in Swahili). Judging by the prices, indigenous Zanzibaris, Swahili elites, freed slaves, and some Omanis held small parcels of land. Those on the island of Zanzibar sold for between MT$15 and $70, while the only farm on the sister island of Pemba sold for a paltry MT$1.50!25 Because this was a time of growing commercial agriculture—especially cloves—land was increasingly valuable to those who could afford the labor to work it.
For some larger holdings, the labor was included in the sale. In 1845 Jairam Shivji bought a shamba in Mwera (outside of town) from Ali bin Muhammad al-Busaidi for MT$650. This sale included the clove and coconut trees on the property and eight slaves.26 Indians commonly owned African slaves, although this became contentious after the 1850s, because the British were attempting to limit the trade in slaves and to claim all Indians as British subjects. Ebji, Jairam’s younger brother, was frequently implicated in the sale of slaves. British intervention led to the forced manumission of Indian-owned slaves during and after the 1860s. Judging by Jairam’s business documents from the 1840s, other slave owners were manumitting slaves for different reasons. The twelve sales records that exist from the 1840s indicate four properties that Jairam Shivji bought from manumitted slaves. Three of the sellers had been slaves of Omani Arabs, and one was the slave of a Swahili man. As Chapter
