A Sea of Debt: Histories of Commerce and Obligation in the Indian Ocean, c. 1850–1940

In late January 1866, on the island of Zanzibar, a freed slave named Musabbah signed a contract with the Indian merchant Kurji Ramdas, in which he agreed to deliver 750 lbs of ivory tusks from the African interior in 2 years. He would have been one of scores of individuals that year who had approached an Indian merchant for loans to finance a similar expedition into the interior, hoping to reap windfall profits from the booming ivory trade. While we lack an indication of how much Musabbah received from Kurji, the deed they left behind tells us that within the same transaction, the freedman also sold Kurji a plot of land, redeemable upon his return.

More than 20 years later, in 1887, that plot of land became the subject of a heated dispute in a British Consular Court between the Sultan of Zanzibar and his Indian customs master, Jairam Sewji, for whom Kurji was acting as agent. Musabbah never returned, having perished during his expedition, and although Jairam had not bothered about the plot in the 20 years since Musabbah left for the interior, Jairam’s representative, a recently arrived Indian attorney from Bombay, claimed that the land was his by virtue of the earlier deed of sale. The Sultan’s attorney, an Arab qadi, countered with an argument that Jairam’s firm mischaracterized the entire transaction—that every Arab or African who went into the interior for ivory executed a similar contingent deed, which simply helped finance his journey by guaranteeing his eventual return, rather than signifying an actual transfer of land. Moreover, the Sultan claimed that he had rightfully purchased the land from a different man, one to whom Msabbah had also sold it, though after the transaction with Kurji.

Far from representing a single, isolated incident, this dispute encapsulated much broader legal tensions on the late nineteenth-century Western Indian Ocean. At stake in that courtroom was not a single plot of land on a small island, but an entire culture of contract and property rights—one that underpinned a credit system that financed the emergence of a regional commercial arena. And at the time the Sultan and his customs master had made their way to the British consular court, the world of commerce and law in the Western Indian Ocean was in the midst of enormous economic and institutional transformations—transformations that nobody in that courtroom could have fully comprehended at the time.

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Western Indian Ocean experienced rapid commercial change. As dates, pearls, cloves, and ivory made their way into new markets and fetched increasing prices, local and regional economies experienced unprecedented growth. The resulting booms in plantation agriculture and natural resource extraction were mainly financed by merchants from India like Jairam and Kurji, who moved in droves to different ports in the Indian Ocean and fanned out into the interiors of Arabia and East Africa. In loaning out money and goods to fuel different agricultural and commercial ventures and forwarding the returns onto their associates across the ocean, Indian merchants brokered between the rhythms and demands of local economic life and the more distant horizons of regional and global commerce.

The repeated acts of lending and borrowing, however, were not simply economic: they also had profound legal implications. In the absence of strong states that upheld property rights, members of this commercial society turned to one another, developing a kind of debt-based mutualism. By fashioning enduring bonds of debt and obligation—bonds that dictated the rhythms and vectors of economic life, linked planters to merchants, mariners to captains, and rulers to merchants—they were able to mitigate the risks associated with trade, and in the process tied together the distant shores of this vast oceanic world of commerce. As a technology—a means of doing—law furnished the institutions and instruments necessary to organize migration and settlement between Arabia, East Africa, and South Asia, and to facilitate access to the capital necessary to fuel economic activity. As a discourse, jurisprudence furnished the intellectual...