elite traders. If, as Isabel Hofmeyr has suggested, the Indian Ocean has become “the subaltern sea,” we need to employ a temporal approach that leaves room for agency and contingency as a wide range of actors created the interlinked Indian Ocean world.17
But what was “time” in the context of the western Indian Ocean? Jürgen Osterhammel reminds us that there were a multitude of methods for reckoning time in the nineteenth century, and prior to the nineteenth century time was far from “universal.”18 Then, in 1884, the same year that the Congress of Berlin met to divide up Africa, the Prime Meridian Conference met in Washington, DC, to divide the world into time zones and to create a universal day that began at midnight.19 This movement was tied to technological innovations like railways, telegraphs, and steamships, which required something more than nonstandardized local times.20 Excellent recent histories of the movement to adopt a universal time narrate their stories beginning in the 1870s and emphasize the way various actors contested the imposition of new time schemes.21 The long history of movement and exchange in the Indian Ocean, however, had created many overlapping units for rendering time before the late nineteenth century. The monsoonal calendar governed ocean travel for millennia, and it created the seasonal rainfall patterns that dictated growing seasons. In the African mainland, dry season trading ventures set the stage for long-distance trade. The date harvesting cycle shaped the patterns of life in eastern Arabia, which stands outside the monsoon rainfall system. Consequently, the need for irrigation and shared water resources led to systems for measuring time with stars and to elaborate units of time—the smallest was one-sixteenth of a second—to measure the water flow in irrigation canals.22
In East Africa, the time of day was measured in hours from the sunrise, so that noon was “saa sita (six hours).” Islamic time had a lunar calendar that included months for fasting and pilgrimage, but the start of these months was locally determined by moon sightings. Likewise, the Islamic calendar did not synchronize with other natural, seasonal calendars, so for instance, Ramadan could occur during Oman’s date harvest one year, slip back through the “agricultural” year, and not coincide with the date harvest again for thirty-three years.
While nineteenth-century technologies helped define parameters of time and space, multiple time scales persisted in the western Indian Ocean. Jeremy Prestholdt has shown that, when the sultan of Zanzibar installed a clock tower in the 1880s, he “domesticated” the clock by setting it to Swahili time, the local standard, in which one o’clock is the first hour after sunrise. Thus he “did not Europeanize time in Zanzibar; rather he adapted the European timepiece to Zanzibari perceptions of time.”23 Erik Gilbert has further demonstrated that dhow travel on monsoon winds was prominent until late in the twentieth century. The flexible logic of dhow sailing—as opposed to the rigid schedule of steamships—allowed dhows to compete on favorable terms with freighters for coastal cargoes.24 Given the ways that those in the western Indian Ocean incorporated or challenged “universal” or “bureaucratic” time, what does it mean to say that people in the western Indian Ocean and its hinterlands bought time?
In Oman, people bought time when they needed to buy water. The country’s interior needed elaborate irrigation schemes to make agriculture possible. The water was distributed by shares. Yet, while some people owned permanent shares, others bought shares in regular auctions. They were not, however, buying certain volumes of water. They were buying units of time, during which the water would flow into their channels.25
The Arabic contracts that people like Juma bin Salim used to acknowledge debt explicitly involved time. One subset of these documents suggests that individuals were literally buying time. Although Juma bin Salim did not put up collateral for his 1869 ivory deal, many others received credit by pledging houses or land, with an agreement to redeem them after a fixed period by paying in ivory. Others took part in bay‘ al-khiyār (optional, reversible sales) that gave the creditor rights to rent or usufruct for a fixed period of time, after which the original owner could withdraw the original sale. When clerks in Zanzibar copied these deeds—sometimes decades later—for the British consul, they often called the deeds “time sales.”
The Arabic documents also demonstrate the imposition of bureaucratic time, which was out of sync with time in the Islamic legal system. The deeds followed Islamic formularies, and the scribes recorded dates in the Arabic calendar. Time for redeemable sales was also measured in Arabic years. Yet the Islamic dates were much less important to the clerks who recorded them for British consular courts. Clerks duly noted, stamped, and indexed the documents by the date they were registered. Sometimes these documents were registered decades after the transactions took place. Juma bin Salim’s 1869 promissory note was registered at the consular court in 1888. This suggests that Juma bin Salim never satisfied this debt despite his promise to return in two years. Operating in and among these overlapping and unstable boundaries of time in the nineteenth century, the concept of “buying time” reflects the literal sense of some transactions, and it also metaphorically explains agency and historical contingency.
This book focuses on debt and mobility as temporizing strategies. Omani Arabs from nonsheikhly lines went overseas when they could no longer access irrigation water. Freed slaves sold property to join the caravan trade, and during their journeys they maneuvered among categories and statuses. Arabs, Africans, and other Indian Ocean actors who took to the caravan trails founded and populated settlements in mainland East Africa. Their opportunistic traveling took them to places where they could find personal autonomy and could attract clients of their own, while the distance from the coast loosened their ties to creditors. In Oman, tribal leaders played cat-and-mouse games with the sultan and his allies—parleying at times and attacking at others. These opportunities to strike, however, were organized through a financial interface—namely credit from Zanzibar—that shaped political tensions with the sultan. These temporizing strategies across the long axis of the western Indian Ocean demonstrate how the constrained agency of multiple actors worked to maintain an interconnected region.
FIGURE 0.2. Juma Merikani’s house in the Congo. From Verney Lovett Cameron, Across Africa (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1877).
DEBT
Notions of time are inextricably linked to the concepts of debt and indebtedness, a second core concept of this book. The anthropologist David Graeber has called debt “just an exchange that has not been brought to completion,” and it follows that what remains in that equation is time. And, as Graeber notes, the time between contracting a debt and repaying is when “just about everything interesting happens.”26 As Juma bin Salim’s two-year promise makes clear, debt was an essential part of acquiring ivory, and thus it was a vital link in a commodity chain that stretched from East African forests to Victorian parlors.27 In this way, ivory was similar to other natural products from the Indian Ocean world—cloves, copal, pearls, and dates—that the growth of global capitalism helped deliver to distant centers.28 The procurement and delivery of these goods around the Indian Ocean depended largely on Indian merchants, like Ladha Damji, who served as key creditors and intermediaries within commodity chains. It was credit and debt from these lenders that drove the commercial expansion of the Indian Ocean world in the nineteenth century.29
Assuming debt and accessing credit allowed people to take advantage of new opportunities in the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century, and they did so through contracts rooted in Islamic law. Juma bin Salim’s promissory note acknowledging his ivory debt to Ladha Damji represented one of many types of waraqa (literally paper) that were flexible instruments used to extend credit and confirm debts. Although non-Muslims like Ladha Damji used these documents widely, the writings followed well-known Islamic formulas so that they would be legitimate in the eyes of qadis (jurists). Thus, one of the goals of such contracts was to avoid the appearance of usury (ribā) because charging interest would invalidate the legality of the
