notes—that have been sitting—uncatalogued and untranslated—in the Zanzibar archives for over 130 years.57 These documents record the activities of Africans, Arabs, and Indians within social and financial networks—networks that included the caravan stations of East Africa and the oasis villages of interior Arabia. The unique information in this archive reveals new and important details about the Indian Ocean’s past. First, these documents show complex variations on the financial transactions that underwrote ivory trading and mortgaged property—in Arabia, on the eastern coast of Africa, and in the African interior. Second, they list 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. These genealogies illustrate the vast diversity of actors involved in these transactions. Third, the documents were created outside colonial and European influence and adhere to long-standing Islamic legal forms, but they also exhibit local inflections. Each deed provides a snapshot of an interconnected world before European colonialism.
The challenge of these documents has been to provide sufficient context to bring them to life. On the one hand, these transaction records have provided nuanced backstories for known individuals like Juma bin Salim. Starting from an interesting deed, on the other hand, I have been fortunate to fill in details of overlooked actors in Indian Ocean history by turning to nineteenth-century colonial archives, travelers’ accounts, missionary journals, Swahili biographies, and Omani scholars. I also gathered family histories by following the routes that the deeds set into motion: up and down the Swahili coast, across the old caravan route to Lake Tanganyika, and to the capital and interior towns of Oman. These sources and methods cannot account, however, for more informal credit networks or arrangements that were never registered. Indeed, the source base is slanted toward those who relied on Indian creditors. During the 1860s and 1870s changes to consular courts and to the definition of who was a British subject meant that Hindu and Muslim Indian businesspeople brought their documents to be registered at the consulate. Fortunately, some of these were decades old so that it becomes possible to reconstruct a range of social worlds from the 1840s and, occasionally, earlier. The breadth of the archive makes clear that throughout the nineteenth century a wide variety of people engaged in these transactions. These exciting new sources provide a way to understand the uses of credit and debt, to see previously overlooked groups, and to map individuals into Indian Ocean circuits.
This book is organized around nine chapters. It begins in Arabia, examining the conditions in Oman during the first decades of the nineteenth century. Chapter 1 argues that a novel combination of environmental, social, and political factors influenced Arab immigration to East Africa. Drought and political disturbances that aligned with periods of intense migration demonstrate that emigrants from the interior of Oman left their villages as a temporizing strategy. These migrants dealt with challenges such as drought, water courses running dry, and palm groves dying, with the seemingly temporary solution of transoceanic migration. This movement was made easier by the Omani sultan’s relocation to East Africa in the 1830s. Omani Arab rule in Zanzibar helped formalize a commercial culture, and chapter 2 analyzes the Arabic business documents that comprise the heart of this book by looking at the 1840s. These documents record agreements between buyers and sellers, creditors and debtors, and each one reflects the enmeshed social and economic relations in the port city of Zanzibar, even as they implicate a broader Indian Ocean seascape.
The third chapter details the enmeshed politics of Zanzibar and Muscat, especially during the rule of Said bin Sultan al-Busaidi (r. 1804–56) and the period after his death. His heirs’ intrigues and rivalries led to civil war in 1859, a division of dominion in 1861, and a revival of the Ibadi Imamate in Muscat in 1868–71. The political and economic relationships between these two capitals remained influential for the rest of the century. Chapter 3 focuses on the Omani rulers’ mobility around the western Indian Ocean and on their exertion of authority through property seizures in Zanzibar and Oman. The 1859 rebellion led to more Arab settlement in the East African interior during the burgeoning ivory trade.
Chapter 4 examines the movements of people. Mobility shifted notions of identity as Indian Ocean peoples established themselves in the East African interior. The nineteenth century marked the delinking of ethnonyms from specific geographies: Arabs were not just in Arabia; Swahili people left the coast; and Nyamwezi and other interior people took to the sea. This movement produced new configurations of people and geographies, which had implications for identity, kinship, and belonging for Arabs and Africans. Chapter 5 focuses on the kinship networks of the most famous trader of this period, Hamed bin Muhammad al-Murjebi, better known as Tippu Tip. Reading his autobiography through the lens of kinship reveals that, rather than being a self-made man, Tippu Tip benefited from elaborate webs of kinship, stretching from Oman to the eastern Congo. His trade organization—like many during this period—relied on siblings, and his marriage into an elite Omani family provided him with property in Zanzibar and Oman. Kinship emerges as a vital way to understand business and family networks.
While both the slave trade and slavery itself have been associated with this period of African history, freed slaves have often been overlooked. Chapter 6 first examines manumission and the mobility of freed slaves in the western Indian Ocean up to the 1850s. Islamic manumission was an important social practice long before European colonization disrupted slavery in East Africa. The chapter then addresses the moral economy of manumission and insincere manumission after the 1850s to meet the demand for labor in the Indian Ocean islands. Chapter 7 looks at the period following the 1873 antislavery treaty to examine Indian Ocean mobility amid the rise of a British documentary regime. New consular courts, a redefinition of British Indian subjecthood, and naval antislavery enforcement all contributed to a focus on new kinds of writing and a return to insincere manumission. By this time, however, African slaves and former slaves were tightly connected to Arab and Indian households, and when households left Africa for Arabia or India they revealed a racial gradient of mobility. By examining the lives of freed slaves—including their economic activity, their relationships with their former masters, and the routes they traveled—the broader history of the western Indian Ocean comes more sharply into focus.
Each of the final two chapters focuses on an individual who represents a microcosm of the Indian Ocean world: a freed slave and an Omani tribal leader. They both built lives and transformed environments far from the sea, but they depended on Indian Ocean credit, mobility, and kinship to advance their own agendas when the deck was stacked against them.
The eighth chapter focuses on the extraordinary career of the man who built the first dhow on Lake Victoria. He was a freed slave who entered the ivory business on the mainland with his partner, another freed slave. They became entangled with Zanzibari creditors and the complex local politics of their African patron. The freed slave and ivory trader created tight kin networks with his patron on the island of Ukerewe in Lake Victoria, and he built “a second Zanzibar” on the lake’s shore. This trading post attracted missionary attention in the 1870s, and it created a collision among the local ruler, the missionaries, and the ivory dealer, which led to many deaths. It sent reverberations across the lake and down the caravan trails to Zanzibar. At the center of the dispute were attempts at the manipulation of credit, misunderstood documents, and a contest in the interior over Indian Ocean trade.
During this period in Arabia, the political history of interior Oman proved to be intricately tied to Indian Ocean networks, specifically credit markets in Zanzibar. Chapter 9 traces the history of Salih bin Ali al-Harthi (1834–1896), a major religiopolitical leader in the Omani interior, to show how his challenges to the Omani sultans were connected
