Fahad Bishara is not the first scholar to delineate the complex relationship between Africa (principally “Zanzibar,” which often stood as shorthand for a much larger swathe of the East African coast and stretches into the interior), Arabia (largely Oman in this book), and India (mostly Gujarat but also the nodes of Bombay, Karachi, and beyond). But he is perhaps the first to tie the legal and economic strands of these relationships to the more often recounted political and social links, thereby moving beyond broad accounts of empire to scrutiny of courts and legal transformations. In the process, he weaves strands of ethnic movement, wide-ranging geography, economic transformation, commercial transactions, and evolving law together in a seamless tapestry of commercial history and social interaction over the past several centuries.
Bishara delves into the evolving economic conditions that had a transformational impact on East Africa in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Among these were the emergence and decline of the Gujarati textile industry; the creation of the shamba—essentially an East African farm producing copra and then especially cloves; the growing demand for slaves to work the plantations; the later development of both an ivory trade and the Uganda Railway that produced economic linkages between coast and interior; and, much later, date exports from Oman. The economic transformation prompted the migration of Gujarati merchants to Zanzibar and Muscat, where successive generations gradually moved beyond trade into money lending. The consequence was the creation of a web of commercial interactions enduring over decades and spanning the western Indian Ocean.
In analyzing these networks, the author focuses on the waraqa, the simple contract of debt that was usually made between Arabs or Africans on one hand and Indian lenders on the other. Originally, the waraqa was a short attestation of a loan secured by land and agreed for a specific duration, written up by a scribe and honored throughout the region. With economic prosperity and growing land ownership around the turn of the nineteenth century, the waraqa became a convenient way of accessing credit. It was the key instrument in a culture of debt marked by long-term relationships between lender and debtor through several generations.
Over time, the waraqa underwent major changes. It was utilized increasingly for khiyar transactions, which “functioned as a form of pawnship: a planter or commercial aspirant would ‘sell’ their property to a lender for an agreed-upon price (that is, the loan amount) that they would have to repay within a specified time frame in order to reclaim the property and render the initial ‘sale’ void” (pp. 90–91). In addition, its legal status was transformed from essentially informal acceptance on various shores of the Indian Ocean as an instrument based on Islamic law into a court document. British judges came to interpret it through a mixture of Islamic and Anglo-Indian law, with the aid of qadis, traditional Islamic judges, and increasingly classified the waraqa as a mortgage.
As boom turned to bust in East Africa, merchants there looked for new opportunities, particularly in Oman. The legal atmosphere was additionally influenced by a renaissance within the Ibadi sect of Islam in Oman as well as Zanzibar. But Oman's economic prosperity was short-lived, and settling waraqa disputes there and in East Africa gradually became more contentious and more ubiquitous in court cases.
Zanzibar serves as the primary geographical focus of Bishara's attention and research, although the Omani presence is also key because of Al Bu Sa'id dominion over Zanzibar and the East African coast for much of the nineteenth century and because Ibadi jurists in Oman provided much of the interpretation of Islamic law that underpinned the commercial exchanges.
Much of Bishara's research utilized the Zanzibar State Archives, where most of the waraqas and legal decisions examined in the book are available. But he also delved into archives in the United Kingdom, India, and Oman—although he is weaker in his discussion of events in Oman, particularly the closer he comes to the present. It should also be noted that the author uses the term “South Arabia” to refer mainly to Oman instead of the more usual practice of using “South Arabia” to mean Yemen and “Eastern Arabia” to mean Oman.
In the epilogue, Bishara recounts being told by a Hindu merchant in Muscat—a descendant of one of the principal merchants of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Muscat—of Omanis from the interior coming to him in the early 1970s with money to repay old waraqas, coupled with requests to destroy the paid-off waraqa. Bishara uses the anecdote to illustrate the question of whether the continued existence of a waraqa meant that it was never paid, to which the author does not have a clear answer. But it strikes this reviewer, who was told the same anecdote by the same merchant many years ago, that it provides another illustration of the lasting moral power of the document and relationship, far beyond enforceable legal ramifications.
It is often too easy to consider modern national boundaries as forming the distinct lines that separated one community from another. A Sea of Debt is instructive in demonstrating how communities have intermingled and traveled across borders and seas over the course of centuries. Bishara is to be congratulated on bringing this fascinating aspect of Indian Ocean history to light and for doing so in such an authoritative and engaging manner.
