A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780–1950 by Fahad Ahmad Bishara (review)

In a somewhat pioneering work, Fahad Ahmad Bishara analyzes the legal underpinnings of commerce in the western Indian Ocean, most notably in western India, Oman, Zanzibar, and mainland East Africa between 1780 and 1950. He adds to a growing body of work on this region and time period that traverses political boundaries across the Arabian Sea. Bishara’s contribution is a legal perspective. In many ways, A Sea of Debt is the history of khiyār sales and waraqas. Khiyār sales were transactions in which people pawned their property in exchange for credit and were the preferred method of credit/debt exchange across the nineteenth-century western Indian Ocean. Meanwhile, waraqas were the “papers” on which khiyār sales were recorded (p. 19). Surviving waraqas that are now held in the Zanzibar National Archives form the bulk of the primary material for the book. Bishara analyses the waraqas alongside Omani-Islamic and British legal texts. Through these documents, he sheds light on the rise and fall of a commercial culture that transcended much of the western Indian Ocean.

A Sea of Debt is organized chronologically. It begins with the expansion of western Indian and Omani commerce in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Specifically, it examines these regions’ growing connections with “Zanzibar,” a region that included the archipelago of the same name and the African mainland opposite it (p. 33). In the background is the growing European, especially British, presence. Indeed, it is as the British enter the historical narrative more prominently from Chapter 4 onwards that Bishara’s analysis comes into its own. In this and subsequent chapters, Bishara analyzes the encounters between Omani and British legal systems, and the contradictions, limitations, and eventual European impositions therein. He cites specific legal cases to display how British courts were “informal” in c. 1870–1890 (p. 138); how the British presided over a range of legal systems in the early colonial period (pp. 166–167); and then how colonial law became standardized through the publication of the Zanzibar Law Reports in 1919 (pp. 169–173). Meanwhile, the influence of Omanis, Indians, and specific conditions in Zanzibar are considered throughout. What emerges is a transregional re-imagining of colonial-era encounters between Europe and the western Indian Ocean.

A Sea of Debt, however, has one major shortfall: for a book that spends most of its time exploring encounters in Africa, Africans receive alarmingly little attention. Bishara does not account for the roles of, for example, African free-waged porters, state-builders, or traders who affected trans-regional networks in a multitude of ways on the African mainland. Indeed, Africans only receive due consideration in discussions about slavery. On the one hand, Bishara’s analysis of slavery builds on some recent trends in Indian Ocean historiography that emphasize the variety of the bonded experience. Particularly noteworthy are the ways in which slaves negotiated personhood and manumission with a view to acquiring credit (pp. 75–78). However, the place of this analysis in the book gives the false impression that Africans only contributed to the western Indian Ocean’s history as subjects in systems of bondage that were imposed from outside. This is problematic for two reasons. Firstly, it perpetuates a widely criticized view that Africans were marginal to the history of the western Indian Ocean; and secondly, it taps into older, discredited perspectives that associated the history of Africa only with the history of slavery.

The absence of Africans in most of the book is particularly galling because some of the primary sources that Bishara refers to imply significant African influence. For example, in attempting to codify colonial law in the early Zanzibar Protectorate, a British judge declared the need to incorporate common law, Zanzibar decrees based on Indian Codes and Acts, Islamic law, and “the multiplicity of customs prevailing among the various communities of Zanzibar” (p. 172). Although...