Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism across the Arabian Sea by Johan Mathew (review)

Smuggling is as "natural" as any economic behavior. For Adam Smith it was a rational response to "unnatural" government policies; for Johan Mathew it is "constitutive" of capitalism itself. Like many recent historians of capitalism, Mathew finds much lacking in traditional theories of political economy that trumpet property rights and free labor. These theories ignore the regulations and coercion that make such abstractions possible. Mathew tells us we can better understand capitalism by studying the actions that undermine it. This was especially true in and around the Arabian Sea, a geographic region just as mutable and dynamic as capitalism itself. Mathew homes in on the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth to show how the origins of capitalism in Asia and Africa developed in lockstep with trafficking. During this century, the British Empire maintained an unprecedented political dominance in the region. It simultaneously created and destroyed "free" markets as it sought to regulate and standardize both the centuries-old economic practices of local traders and the activities of other European officials whose minimal presence nevertheless competed with British aims to determine the rules of the free market. Margins of the Market overcomes silences in the colonial archives by locating ethnographies of smuggling in police surveillance, court transcripts, interviews, and regulatory memoranda. In conjunction with imperial business records, these documents compellingly reveal the "multiple entangled histories" of labor, goods, and money and the fuzzy lines between licit and illicit, state and private, human and commodity (p. 3).

Mathew adapts the sociological theory of "framing" to the Arabian Sea context, where what he defines as "framing out" illustrates how the trades that are excluded from the legal free market are just as integral to the functioning of capitalist economies as those included in it (pp. 7–8). In this region, capitalism was less about free labor, private property, and wealth-generating capital, and more about the abolition of slavery, violence, and unstandardized currency. Mathew develops this concept in five thematic chapters that each move from the nineteenth century into the twentieth century, with the first addressing the physical margins of the market, the last the theoretical economic ones, and the middle chapters devoted to specific commodities—labor, weapons, and money. The first chapter explains how trade and transportation functioned before the mid-nineteenth century, when British officials began "framing out" older modes of transport, which they dismissed as vessels of irrational peddling. By delegitimizing traditional dhows, whose actual physical characteristics mattered less than how Europeans interacted with them, colonial bureaucrats made steamships the dominant form of transportation for the free market.

Mathew's argument that state-imposed frames created the free market is perhaps best illustrated by his chapter on the arms trade. Violence was simultaneously a commodity and a method of regulation, as laws made approved firearms private property, while state-sanctioned violence protected this property. The distinction between licit and illicit was, like most aspects of capitalism, artificial and unclear, and thus vulnerable to violation by both government officials and private traders. Officials' prejudices and preferences masqueraded as uniform regulations. They were more likely to permit the import of British rifles than Belgian or German ones, more focused on African slavery than Arab slavery, more likely to question marriage contracts between Arab men and African women, and more willing to target counterfeiters from the Indian princely states than from the Chapparband tribe.

The tension between pseudostandardization and specialized knowledge culminates in a final chapter that addresses the ways in which imperial officials struggled to regulate market value. Economic theories about marginal utility bumped up against commercial relationships that sought to keep information private and to maintain transactions as processes of personal negotiations and religious influence. Real market prices did not exist but had to be created by bureaucrats, who required merchants to document market values in invoices. These invoices never fully replaced...