numbers than at any point in history. Assessing this mobility helps us balance both individual agency and the results of unintended consequences. If Juma bin Salim intended, at some point, to leave his plantations and trading hub and return with his dependents and his store of ivory to Zanzibar, settle his debts, and perhaps even go back to Oman, he died before he could do so. He ran out of time.
KINSHIP
Kinship was a vital factor in the organization of trade and mobility in the Indian Ocean. Likewise, trade and mobility led to the reconfiguration of family and broadened the purview of kin. Genealogy was a key strategy of self-representation in documents and, as a result of exogamous marriages, descent also became a discourse of belonging for Indian Ocean actors. Across the Indian Ocean, scholars have documented the family trees of rulers, descendants of the Prophet, and Sufi scholars, but new sources make it possible to reconstruct kin networks and clan memberships for other Indian Ocean actors.39
Although little evidence exists for us to see Juma bin Salim amid his own kin networks, he proudly listed three generations of paternal ancestors in a promissory note, and he established a household in the Congo with a Ugandan wife who helped oversee his ivory stores. Even from this limited information we can see how kinship functioned on two levels. The first level was an official genealogical one—the patrilineal line and clan—that created differences between people and ordered and legitimated a social order.40 On the second level, the idiom of kinship described connections to other people, and these connections or relationships could be used in certain circumstances. For Juma bin Salim, this was his African wife, and for others in East Africa these included maternal uncles and uterine brothers. Indeed, in the Indian Ocean world, the calculus of kinship was important. Said bin Salim al-Lamki was born on the Swahili coast to an Omani Arab father and a Malagasy mother. Said bin Salim served as the wali (governor) of Saadani on the Swahili coast before the sultan appointed him in 1857 to lead Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke on their expedition in search of the Nile. Burton was scaldingly dismissive of Said bin Salim al-Lamki’s obsession with kinship, complaining of Said’s “ignorance and apathy concerning all things but A. bin B., and B. bin C., who married his son D. to the daughter of E.” 41 But Said’s focus makes clear that genealogy, kinship, and marriage were vital. Birth and genealogy were tools that mobile Indian Ocean actors could use to establish new statuses and roles by calling on new categories of kin.42
Familial networks served as an infrastructure linking to production and reproduction in the western Indian Ocean. In her work on Indian networks between western India and East Africa, Hollian Wint challenges narrow conceptions of trading diasporas and static views of kinship to show the centrality of families and households. They were “neither peripheral to trading networks nor unchanging units within them, rather, they were at the core of trans-local connections and transformations.” 43 These transformations are clear when we see kinship as socially constructed and use it as a way to analyze social inequalities through gender, power, and difference. Within Arab families in East Africa, for example, family structures changed with mobility and new marriages, and in some cases these resulted in pronounced inequalities among kin.
ENVIRONMENT
Itinerant people in the western Indian Ocean reacted to environmental challenges and reshaped local ecologies.44 This book prioritizes environmental histories alongside human histories, heeding anthropologist Anna Tsing’s call to take seriously nonhuman actors, disturbance-based ecologies, and their shared roles in histories of capitalism.45 The Indian Ocean monsoon system has structured mobility around the ocean; likewise, periodic droughts outside the ocean’s intertropical convergence zone created difficulties for date farmers in Arabia’s marginal lands. Arabs left Arabia in greater numbers in times of drought. When cyclones and floods came—wiping out palm groves and settlements—Omanis also took to the sea. Repatriated monies from migrants helped finance new irrigation channels and expand Arab settlements into marginal lands, but the threat of silting water channels and drought made for precarious livelihoods. The plentiful rain in coastal East Africa must have been a welcome relief to Arabian migrants. In Zanzibar, clove mania led to the confiscating and repurposing of farmland in the 1830s. A disastrous hurricane in 1872 destroyed substantial portions of the clove crop and undermined the sultan’s independence. On the mainland, people pursuing the lucrative ivory trade changed elephant ecologies: herd populations, habitats, and dispersal. In 1875, Livingstone’s biographer suggested that 44,000 elephants a year were killed to supply England with ivory.46 While not all of these elephants were from East Africa, the demand for cheaper tusks created a moving East African ivory frontier, which encouraged hunters to travel deeper into the continent. Some Indian Ocean migrants and their dependents settled alongside Africans in the interior, and some carved out their own small communities. They planted the trees and field crops they wanted to feed themselves. They spread rice cultivation into the central African lake regions and the Congo River’s tributaries. People living in western Tanzania still associate mango trees with early Arab settlers.
THE WESTERN INDIAN OCEAN, NEW SOURCES, AND ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK
Buying Time uses a unique set of sources to complement and build on histories of East Africa and Arabia. By connecting the regions of the western Indian Ocean, this book argues for a more synthetic view of the processes that set people and goods in motion in the nineteenth century. An oceanic perspective has always helped explain the history of East Africa, but an oceanic turn in the approach to history—what some have called a “new thalassology”—in the first decade of the twenty-first century has made it easier to assess connections between distant regions through the sea.47 The earliest twentieth-century histories of East Africa posited that the Indian Ocean was a source of “invaders” who “exploited” the region.48 Important classic works noted the role of Indian Ocean trade networks for coastal entrepôts linked to trade and production in the African interior.49 Some scholarship specified the role of “Arabs” (loosely defined) from the Indian Ocean as oppositional to Europeans in Africa, missing the opportunity to describe both groups as part of a broader regional historical trajectory.50 Close study of coastal societies revealed waves of immigration from both the sea and the interior that shaped political discourse and rebellion on the eve of European colonization, and Africans from the interior shaped forms of labor on long-distance trade to and from the coast.51 While many of the historical actors had ties to distant shores, and these regional histories acknowledge the role of the ocean as a source of trade goods or migrants, they do not cross it.
A willingness to cross the sea and engage the Indian Ocean as an organizing framework also deepens our understanding of the history of Arabia. The initial histories of Oman deemphasized oceanic connections, while more recent work on the nineteenth century has focused on the Muscat-Zanzibar nexus in terms of trade and British imperial politics.52 The historian Nile Green disaggregated “the Middle East” into three arenas, one of which is the Indian Ocean. (The others are the Mediterranean Sea and Inner Asia.) A benefit of this formulation, he argues, is “bringing Africa into view as a crucial component in the development of Middle Eastern societies.”53 Certainly recent excellent work on Africans in Arabia shows the merit of this approach.54 Buying Time works from both the Arabian and African shores of the western Indian Ocean to show how the movement of people between them was a crucial component of the development of both regions in the nineteenth century. Within histories of the Indian Ocean in the imperial age, India, as a subimperial power, and Indians moving within “greater India” have been prominent.55 Hadrami Arabs have received the most attention as an Arabian diaspora.56 While these groups certainly figure into our story, the focus of this work will be primarily on the broad social array of Omani Arabs and Africans in western Indian Ocean networks that stretched into continental hinterlands.
* * *
While this new thalassology adds an oceanic perspective, new sources make it easier to trace the movements of people across this broad, complicated region. These new sources include thousands of Arabic business
