Dhows and the Colonial Economy of Zanzibar, 1860-1970 (review)

Erik Gilbert seeks to set the record straight about dhows. According to him, dhows and the commerce they enabled have suffered from neglect and outright hostility at the hands of British administrators, postcolonial officials, and historians alike. This book is less about dhows themselves than it is about the uses to which the vessels were put. While giving passing attention to the design, construction, sailing, and navigation of dhows, Gilbert's study concentrates on their economic and political role, making an effective case for their centrality to Zanzibar's prosperity during the colonial era.

Gilbert is keen to situate Zanzibar in the wider western Indian Ocean economic and cultural zone. His research took him not only to Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam, but also to Yemen and Kenya. He relies mostly on colonial-era archival sources, but peppers his narrative with anecdotes from his travels and interviews with merchants and seamen. This approach presents certain challenges, for Gilbert must conceptually integrate small-scale trading systems and commercial linkages with the larger patterns of exchange in the Indian Ocean littoral.

It was the dhow (a term adopted by Europeans to describe a variety of sailing vessels) that made the regional economy possible, transporting consumer goods, passengers, and bulk cargo among ports in the islands, East Africa, and Asia. During the 110 years covered in this study, the dhow went from being the workhorse of Zanzibar's shipping to being almost completely irrelevant. But this was not a story of how more-efficient seagoing technologies drove out obsolete technologies. Gilbert's central thesis is that the dhow remained competitive with more "modern" ships right through the colonial era (1890–1963), and disappeared in Zanzibar only because of the ruthless application of government restrictions in the postcolonial period.

For the British, dhows, while picturesque, represented an obstacle to the broader colonial project of modernizing Zanzibar's economy. They were relatively small, leaky, "oriental", and—worst of all—difficult to regulate. Gilbert chronicles the means by which the colonial authorities attempted to force local and international shipping, particularly of cloves, onto steamships. But dhows had several advantages over steamships: lower construction cost, lower recurrent expenses, greater flexibility, and the ability to navigate shallow inlets. And the entrepreneurs who owned or hired the dhows were quick to exploit niche markets (exporting mangrove poles to Arabia, for example) that were of little interest to those operating more "modern" modes of transport.

The dhow represents the unofficial economy, thriving in spite of the best efforts of the state. Gilbert goes so far as to describe its role as "subversive" to the colonial agenda, and documents officialdom's attempts to cope with it. To control it, the state had to identify it, and one of the more amusing passages in the book deals with attempts by the Tanganyikan government to define exactly what a dhow is. But British attitudes ultimately changed. Dhows proved crucial to Zanzibar's economic survival during the Second World War and its prosperity during the economic boom of the early 1950s. British policies became more accommodating in the last years of the protectorate. Ironically, just as the British were reconciling themselves to the dhow economy, long-distance dhow trade was declining under pressure from the oil boom in the Persian Gulf. Gilbert predicts that this decline would have continued, whatever the policies of the new Zanzibari government.

It was the Revolutionary Government of Zanzibar, assuming power in 1964, that choked off the long-distance dhow trade in Zanzibar. There were two reasons for its action. One was that the new regime was, according to Gilbert, much more rigid in its modernizing impulses than the British had been, and much less tolerant of the "subversive" dhow economy. The other is related to the ethnic and social issues swirling around the Revolution. About half the dhows trading in Zanzibar were Asian-owned, and the dhows brought Asian migrants and traded with Asian ports. Many Asians...