A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780–1950

Asian Connections

by Fahad Ahmad Bishara

In this innovative legal history of economic life in the Western Indian Ocean, Bishara examines the transformations of Islamic law and Islamicate commercial practices during the emergence of modern capitalism in the region. In this time of expanding commercial activity, a mélange of Arab, Indian, Swahili and Baloch merchants, planters, jurists, judges, soldiers and seamen forged the frontiers of a shared world. The interlinked worlds of trade and politics that these actors created, the shared commercial grammars and institutions that they developed and the spatial and socio-economic mobilities they engaged in endured until at least the middle of the twentieth century. This major study examines the Indian Ocean from Oman to India and East Africa over an extended period of time, drawing together the histories of commerce, law and empire in a sophisticated, original and richly textured history of capitalism in the Islamic world.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Law

292 pages, Paperback

First published March 10, 2017

Reviews

[Monica Mitri · Rating 5 out of 5]

In his prologue to "A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780-1950," Fahad Bishara recenters law in the Indian Ocean economic historiography, where it is often overshadowed by scholarship on merchant communities and their networks of trust. Bishara’s focus on the law allows him to recover the indigenous voices which worked, traded and interacted across the Indian Ocean (mostly from East Africa, Oman, Zanzibar and western India), and which are often obscured by imperial history. He locates law “everywhere and nowhere”: as technology (a means of coordinating action), as discourse and as modality of rule by which sovereignty was negotiated across transregional trade relations. Law was constitutive of the political economy across the Indian Ocean; “[i]n a sense, law was less an object than it was a language for commercial society.” Law structured trans-oceanic trade relations, contracts and deeds, as revealed by the waraqas which Bishara regards as narrative devices that can provide a gateway into the trans-oceanic political and economic realms.
Waraqas (from the Arabic waraqa: paper) were the deeds of debt that people drew up as they moved their goods, trades and lives across the Indian Ocean. They formed a “common Indian Ocean grammar of economic life,” a grammar of “trad[ing] in debt” and of obligation chains that structured the trans-oceanic economy and held it together. Bishara builds on the concept of obligation as a complete social phenomenon, not just an economic construct, but one that “can tie together a socially embedded economic history with a multi-layered legal history.” Coordinating with katibs, jurists structured a complex legal framework for the developing political economy, negotiating debt, credit, and obligations. It encompassed the various participants with their different legal personhoods, and allowed them “to engage in prolonged, multi-generational relations of credit, debt, and obligation in an expanding commercial society.” Waraqas were a significant tangible and legible expression of this economy and its malleability, in which legal innovation was crucial and merchants, jurists, qadis and katibs were partners. Bishara triangulates his study of waraqas with prescriptive fiqh manuals, fatwas as well as British consular court cases and official correspondences. It is how he contextualizes his economic history in terms of the developing Indian Ocean trade and its encounter with modern capitalism and imperialism.
Bishara’s analysis of waraqas to rethink Indian Oceanic history is reminiscent of Jessica Goldberg’s work on medieval Middle Eastern Jewish merchants. Goldberg’s reliance on the Geniza documents (merchant letters, contracts, etc.) allows her to reconstruct medieval Middle Eastern geographies of trade, within and beyond the medieval Jewish communities. Like Bishara, she focuses on the interplay of law, trade and personal networks that mobilized commercial enterprises in the premodern era. The dynamic and complex network of merchants, agents, suhba and slaves that she portrays, complete with the robust social economy where reputation, agility, and jah were prominent, did not function independently of legal or state structures. Through Bishara and Goldberg conduct their research in different times and spaces, they both argue for the intricate presence of law in the developing Islamicate world of trade.
In terms of Islamic law, Bishara draws attention to the ways in which Muslim jurists interacted with, negotiated and contributed to the changing economic orders. In this he joins other scholars of late antique, medieval and early modern Islamic law, who argue for its dynamism and against interpreting it in essentialist and static frameworks. Most notable among these is Lena Salaymeh, who works with Islamic law as “an intertextual space in which historical precedents, exegesis, and legal opinions shape each other” (The Beginnings of Islamic Law: Late Antique Islamicate Legal Traditions, Cambridge University Press, 2016, p.201).
Bishara’s writing is skillful, eloquent, and very engaging. His trans-oceanic law ebbs and flows with the waves of multiple journeying merchants, products, information and waraqas. As it charts its course across new waters, sometimes it moves gently and at others it weathers the burgeoning British imperialist and capitalistic storms. Writing about trans-oceanic trade, Bishara’s language takes his readers onto the ocean in which he embeds his study.

[Plof · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book masterfully unpacks contractual culture in the western Indian Ocean in the late 18th to early 20th centuries through attention to actors and changing contexts. Various groups of people in the trans-regional geography between Oman and Zanzibar -- Gujarati financiers, sultans and Islamic jurists, plantation owners, caravan leaders, slave laborers, katibs (scribes) -- were bound to one another through relations of obligation, which were written down on 'waraqa' or debt deeds. Law was a lexicon embedded in social circumstances that sustained trade and property-ownership/sales across the oceans.

British legal order expanded into Zanzibar in the mid-19th century, coordinated through arrivals of circulating Indian lawyers and influx of merchants/laborers in East Africa. Multiple legal systems and interpretations came together. Rather than unilinear domination, there developed a kind of order in which practitioners of parallel Anglo-Indian and Islamicate Omani systems referred to one another and adapted to transforming commercial circumstances. British judges engaged with waraqa and what they understood to be Islamic legal corpus, and brought in Islamic judges (qadis) in courtrooms. On the flip side, the authority of qadis continued, and in some ways, expanded; there was an explosion of circulations in printed legal texts using steamship transport, and there were spaces outside the British courtroom where debates/disputes on waraqas took place. That haphazard balance fell apart following the Great Depression and surge in foreclosures, as expert consultants from other British colonies were brought in, waraqa became means of state intervention, and individuals were substituted by institutions.

This is a very rich book that shows how transregional Islamic law can be understood from the bottom up. The narrative and stories are easy to follow even though the book itself is definitely for an academic audience. The language can get dry at times -- not surprising considering the nature of the materials. The second part of the book (except the last chapter) seems a little less coherent than the first. And East Africa appears more on the receiving end of the story, as the materials are more or less centered on Arabs/Indians/British. But what has already been uncovered and told is impressive.

[Kavya]

This book looks at the role of the waraqa in facilitating trade between India, Oman and Zanzibar with a focus on the translation and adaptation process of the khiyar under British colonial expansion. This device had many different meanings between historical actors and the British particularly wanted to make the paper more legalistic than relational. Al Khalili was one jurist who particularly contributed to the smooth operation of khiyar, a type of flexible mortgages, for financing clove plantations. Yet his fate was quite shockingly brutal due to Oman's dynastic intrigues. Later commentators thought that he was too optimistic toward British influence.
The fine analysis of sources and relations between Hindu or Khoja traders as well as the role of the Arabic nasab sheds light on an expanding definition of Islamic law. I liked the multilingual scripts written on different documents, showing an obvious late hegemony of English in this part of the Indian Ocean. The book also explored Al Salimi's scathing comment on the British who had "no religion other than their own interest" and his role in stopping further British mercantile takeovers in Oman. Yet the question of capital accumulation and slavery is relatively under-explored. Women occasionally appear in the legal archive as proprietors but their role in cultivation is not the focus of the book.

[Ravi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This subtle and stimulating book warrants a broad audience in multiple disciplines and deserves to be widely reviewed. Recently awarded a prestigious prize by the Law and Society Association, Professor Bishara traces how debt instruments or waraqas were used in colonial Zanzibar and elsewhere. In doing so, he painstakingly traces contested meanings of law and property at the intersection of the British empire, islamic city states such as Muscat and Indian bania traders. The result is a rich tapestry that deserves the widest possible attention from legal scholars and historians, especially those who have no fluency in Gujarati or Arabic. His discussion of the epistemic role played by the Zanzibar Law Reports and the emergence of a colonial bar are particularly rewarding to those who have read authors such as Wesley Pue of the University of British Columbia. A little more about the Uganda Railway would have been appreciated and there is little about the political economy aspects that led to the dramatic changes in the early 20th century to put an end to the waraqa system. But these are mere quibbles. This is a magnificent scholarly achievement of the highest magnitude.

[Katherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super well-written and easy to follow; interesting history of financial and property law (especially surrounding contracts) in 19th and 20th century East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and Western India.