the latest wave of globalization. He noted that the civilization of the Mediterranean “spreads far beyond its shores in great waves that are balanced by continual returns,” and suggests, “We should imagine a hundred frontiers, not one, some political, some economic, some cultural.” Without looking at this zone of influence, it would be difficult to grasp the sea’s history.5 In his formulation, the Mediterranean pulsed, creating a dynamic “world” over time. Braudel’s work became the foundation for a new scholarship of oceanic spaces, and comprehensive histories of the Indian Ocean have explicitly attempted to adopt Braudel’s model.6 The proliferation of Braudel-inspired studies around the world gave rise to a “new thalassology” (the study of the sea), and the Indian Ocean has emerged as an important space in this new field.7
Despite the Indian Ocean’s much longer standing as an arena of human interaction and cross-cultural exchange, the Atlantic Ocean has attracted more scholarly attention. One result of this has been a lopsided sibling rivalry between oceanic adherents—lopsided in the sense that scholars of the Indian Ocean have been the ones to call attention to the slights of inclusion and perceived inequalities. For example, the Indian Ocean was left out of a forum on “Oceans of History” in the American Historical Review that focused only on the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Pacific.8 Scholars of slavery in the Indian Ocean have been particularly diligent in trying to provincialize Atlantic plantation chattel slavery as but one of many forms of bondage and dependence.9 In both oceanic worlds, however, Africa has historically been given short shrift, generally characterized by slavery and its human contributions to the slave trade. Recent scholarship by Atlantic Africanists, however, although focused on slavery generally, offer models and insights that can enrich Indian Ocean histories through biography and micro-history, paying attention to the dynamic changes in port cities, and mapping oceanic actors in broader hinterlands.10 A focus on Africa’s relationship to its western ocean has profitably expanded the scope of Atlantic world studies, and in this book the Indian Ocean world is inconceivable without Africa.
The boundaries of the Indian Ocean world varied over time, and this book demonstrates how the nineteenth century was the time of their greatest extent and their greatest incorporation of Africa. Many anthropologists and social scientists have grappled with late twentieth-century (and early twenty-first-century) globalization. From their perspective, nation-states and continents break down, failing to be useful containers of human activity. Arjun Appadurai calls them “problematic heuristic devices,” and scholars have approached subjects across national boundaries that have revealed new insights about the global order.11 One of these approaches replaces standard geographic considerations with “process geographies” that can shift (like Braudel’s pulsing Mediterranean) and focuses on “congeries of language, history, and material life.”12 Newer historical studies of the Indian Ocean have used innovative and unconventional sources (like genealogies of diasporic communities) and have read colonial archives against the grain to find new connections between nodes.13 This study attempts to do both. The Arabic transaction records in the Zanzibar Archives describe a type of process geography, a world of credit and debt. This information is embedded in Arabic contracts about assets and people, from Arabia to central Africa. Commodity chains (like those of ivory) and foodways (such as the production, consumption, and social practice around the Omani sweetmeat halwa) have spatial dimensions and dispersed geographies in this Indian Ocean world. By focusing on debt—both as an economic relationship and as part of a network of social relationships—this book describes human mobilities and a unified geography by pursuing connections across boundaries of race, ethnicity, status, class, and religion. This book considers time, debt, mobility, kinship, and environment to show how individuals took advantage of credit and mobility to temporize and to reshape their lives.
This book concentrates on the hinterlands of the western Indian Ocean, during the long nineteenth century. In European terms, we can define this period as spanning the French Revolution to World War I. This era encapsulates the Anglo-French rivalry in the Indian Ocean; British attempts to gain more control over India and its dependencies, both before and after 1857; and the explosion of colonization in the last decades of the century. While such global processes affected many people in this story, local events governed their lives in more profound ways. In eastern Arabia, local rulers chose either to accommodate or to challenge Wahhabi expansion, and rulers in Muscat, Oman, struggled to shore up their power in the face of challenges from their families and coreligionists. Omani sultans sought to balance this opposition with cooperation—both commercial and political allegiances—with British officials and their Indian subjects.
On the African coast and in the interior, Zanzibar’s economic boom made the island an important node. Local trade in cloth, gunpowder, ivory, and slaves reconfigured polities and practices near and far. Formal Omani rule in Zanzibar was a novelty during this period. Said bin Sultan al-Busaidi brought the East African coast under his control, moved his court to Zanzibar in the 1830s, and ruled dominions in Arabia and Africa until his death in 1856. His sons became sultans in Oman and Zanzibar, and their rivalries and their reluctant British clientship paved the way for international treaties that limited the slave trade and later ceded territory and created colonial sovereignty.
The western Indian Ocean is the stage for the action in this book, and it includes not just the cosmopolitan port cities long connected to maritime trading networks but also the distant hinterlands of Arabia and Africa. This area includes the rugged mountain-to-desert landscapes of eastern Arabia, the Indian Ocean seascape, the fertile islands of Zanzibar and Pemba, the mangrove-guarded coasts of East Africa, the central plateau of the eastern African mainland, the Rift Valley lakes, and the tributaries that pushed the Congo River to the Atlantic Ocean. Remarkably, by the end of the nineteenth century, this diverse geography had some things in common. Arabs from Oman and Swahili speakers from the coast inhabited trading outposts across the east central African plateau, built dhows on the shores of the Great Lakes, and navigated the Congo River. Africans from the interior lived on the east coast and traveled—some as slaves, others free—to coastal and interior Arabia. Human mobility connected interior regions to global trade networks, expanded the Islamic ecumene, and broadened the boundaries of the Swahiliphone world.
Throughout this period and across these spaces, this book focuses on five factors—time, debt, mobility, kinship, and environment—to elucidate the patterns and disjunctures around which people in the western Indian Ocean structured their lives.
TIME
The notion of “buying time” is an organizing metaphor for this book. It frames both historical contingency and the many time-mediated exchanges that were vital to the region. Buying time is shorthand for a particular type of historical agency: temporizing. To temporize is to adopt a course of action to conform to circumstances; to wait for a more favorable moment; or to negotiate to gain time.14 By seeing the actions of Indian Ocean actors in this framework, we recognize the limited choices and difficult decisions they had to make, often with incomplete knowledge.15 This also allows us to focus on people of middling and low status, such as impoverished migrants, freed slaves, and nonsheikhly Arabs, and recognize that even sultans and tribal leaders had to make decisions between an uncomfortable status quo and a possible threatening future. In the western Indian Ocean, slaves often had more power than an outside observer would expect, and sultans often had less. Western Indian Ocean actors used temporizing strategies to improve their circumstances, enhance their autonomy, and increase their security. The strategies for buying time provide a lens to view the actions and choices of individual actors to go along, to parley, and to see what would happen in a world of uncertain outcomes.
This approach preserves a sense of historical contingency that has often been overlooked in teleological approaches to the history of East Africa and Oman. Some Marxian and world-systems analyses have tended to treat economic processes, class formation, and European colonialism as foregone conclusions. Likewise, racial and ethnic categories that hardened in the violent politics of Zanzibar in the 1950s and 1960s have tended to cloud fluid identities from the previous century.16 The combination of these sets of arguments
