left many things—not just Juma’s colorful nickname—unwritten. It did not mention money or acknowledge that Ladha had ever lent money to Juma. Those arrangements were kept separate to avoid the Islamic prohibition on interest. The elements of the contract reveal a historical process rooted in Islamic finance and adapted to a burgeoning global commodity trade. Fulfilling the contract’s promise required the cooperation (and coercion) of people from the Indian Ocean littoral and the residents of its interior hinterlands: Africans, Arabs, and Indians. Juma’s contract also spanned a vast geography: his hometown was in the interior of eastern Arabia, and his debt would require him to travel to new ivory outposts near the Congo’s tributaries. This contract for African ivory included a set of global exchanges: the capital financing his journey came from Bombay, and the cotton sheeting he exchanged for ivory came from American mills in Massachusetts. When the contract was written, the ivory was still attached to elephants in upland Africa, and at least fifty of them would need to be killed to meet the contract’s terms. All this would take time, and time mediated the relationships between the people, geography, and commodities in this contract. As for the intermediaries, complex negotiations, and travel required to repay the debt to Ladha, Juma bin Salim had two years to figure it out.
FIGURE 0.1. Juma bin Salim al-Bakri al-Nizwi’s 1869 acknowledgment of ivory debt. Registered deed 1063 of 1888, AM 12/20, Zanzibar National Archives.
Juma bin Salim was one of a multitude of migrants in the western Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century, and his life course represents one path among a wide range of trajectories that transformed the region. Juma bin Salim was originally from Nizwa, an ancient city in the interior of Oman, but he made his name as an ivory trader in central Africa, where he would eventually be buried in 1887. At the time of his death, he had been an active trader on Lake Tanganyika and the Congo tributaries for thirty-some years. Juma bin Salim controlled large stores of ivory, managed plantations of rice and maize, had several African wives, and was a vital source of geographic knowledge for the few Europeans who had reached the center of the continent.2
What set this world into motion? Why would date farmers and city dwellers from Arabian oases leave their homes for uncertain ventures in East Africa? Part of the explanation is environmental. In the late 1830s, three decades before Juma bin Salim wrote his promissory note, an extreme drought in the interior of Oman led many residents to leave for the Arabian coast and the Indian Ocean world. But economics and politics also contributed. Around the same time as the drought, the Omani sultan—motivated by trade and strategy—relocated his court and his capital from Muscat to Zanzibar, over two thousand miles away. The sultan’s move was just one part of a larger pattern of migration from Arabia and India to Zanzibar and the African coast in the nineteenth century. Zanzibar was where Juma bin Salim promised to deliver ivory to Ladha Damji, who had himself been born into poverty in Kutch in western India. Ladha Damji became notoriously wealthy in Zanzibar as the head of the island’s most important commercial house, as well as the sultan’s master of the customs revenue. Ladha invested heavily in slaves and ivory by lending money to caravan leaders like Juma bin Salim. His investment portfolio included loans for ivory, plantations, and houses. Juma bin Salim’s contract gave him two years to fulfill its terms. He set to work, crossing from Zanzibar to the mainland, hiring a band of porters, and organizing a caravan to travel hundreds of miles into the African interior. During his travels, Juma bin Salim acquired great stores of ivory, gave loans to European explorers, and eventually chose not to return to Zanzibar to face his creditor.
MAP 0.1. The western Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century
In the nineteenth century, ivory became East Africa’s most valuable export, and it complemented a rise in plantation culture on the East African coast. Ivory and plantations spurred an economic boom in Zanzibar. Ivory was the plastic of its day, used in manufacturing a wide array of items, and, like copal, cloves, and coconuts, one of many East African commodities with a growing global demand. Juma bin Salim and other caravan leaders of his era tried to meet the increasing demand for tusks by venturing deeper into the African interior to find elephants. In the 1840s, Juma’s colleagues crossed from the eastern part of the continent to the west, two generations before Europeans.3 By the late 1860s when he drew up his contract with Ladha Damji, Juma bin Salim had been a caravan trader for at least a decade. His early trips revealed the amount of ivory in the eastern Congo, and by the 1860s an “ivory fever” had developed there akin to the California Gold Rush or the scramble for diamonds in South Africa.4 Ivory fever had consequences for peoples and polities across east and central Africa. Indeed, Juma’s 1869 contract with Ladha Damji was part of a cresting wave that thrust residents of the Indian Ocean basin into deeper and more frequent contact with peoples of Central Africa. These waves of contact created pools of Indian Ocean culture far into the interior. Juma settled in the eastern Congo, and many travelers observed “second Zanzibars” in Africa. The undertow of this movement swept away ivory and the Africans who harvested it—first to the littoral and then out to sea. An ocean away, these same tides pulled Arabs from interior towns, while the wealth from East Africa reconfigured Arab settlements and local politics.
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Buying Time is a history of how nineteenth-century credit and mobility knit together a vast region, extending from the deserts of Arabia to the equatorial forests of Africa’s Congo watershed. Juma bin Salim and others who created this western Indian Ocean world—Africans, Arabs, and Indians—used monsoon winds and ancient trade routes to link port cities to distant hinterlands. They relied on Islamic financial instruments with deep roots in Indian Ocean exchanges to record obligations of creditors and debtors. From the 1820s onward these men and women endeavored to take advantage of the new opportunities—as traders, as patrons, and as clients—available in an increasingly globalized economy. When their initial strategies failed, or when they met resistance from entrenched hierarchies, they bought time. Time allowed them to escape drought, seek new markets, acquire ivory, reconfigure life paths, and often—but not always—pay off debts. In the half century before European colonization, Africans, Arabs, and Indians used credit and new circuits of mobility to seek out new opportunities, establish themselves as men of means in distant places, and maintain families in a rapidly changing economy. To tell this story, this book traces people’s movements and the financial flows that underwrote their activities. It is a story told in previously unexplored Arabic contracts. The documents that lie at the heart of this book illustrate the startling reach of the Indian Ocean world even as they convey the individual aspirations of the people who inhabited it.
As a social history of interconnected Indian Ocean worlds, this book is foremost about people: families who left date farms in Arabia; freed slaves who bet on the ivory trade; sultans and their rivals; displaced Swahili elites; religious ideologues; mixed race Indo-Africans; dissident traders; sophisticated scribes; African porters; Arab confectioners; and an eloping Arab princess who became a German housewife and author. The members of this diverse group inhabited overlapping regions in Arabia and Africa. They also shared a set of scribal practices and used fixed formulas to carry out transactions. Their documents cut across a world now rife with national boundaries. At the same time, they created obligations between creditors and debtors. These obligations fit into broader Indian Ocean patterns of patronage and clientship, which crossed ethnic, geographic, and cultural groupings. By focusing on the strategies that individuals developed in the face of broader changes, this book examines the complex, interwoven, and mobile societies that existed in the western Indian Ocean in the years before formal colonialism would undermine these ties.
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This book joins a growing body of scholarly literature in oceanic history, a field pioneered by Fernand Braudel, whose 1949 history of the sixteenth-century Mediterranean “world” recognized that the sea was not a true boundary during that period. In many
