I generally post an end of year summary of some of the enjoyable things I’ve read during the year, but thought I would try writing short reviews here on the blog of some of the historical works (and maybe some fiction) as I finish them up.
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In recent decades, historians of the Americas, Western Europe, and West Africa have begun to study what they call the “Atlantic World.” This term stems from a recognition of how interconnected different places bordering the Atlantic became from the 1500s onward, and of how studying phenomena like slavery, migration, trade, ecological transformation, and the flow of political ideas requires scholars to step over the national borders that often make up the historian’s “unit” of analysis, and instead examine how these things played out across the Atlantic. It is also an approach that recognizes how oceans and bodies of water more generally are highways for people, products, and ideas.
Long before the Atlantic became this kind of interconnected space, the Indian Ocean functioned in a similar way for states and people in eastern Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Southeastern, and East Asia. Although some scholars have long agitated for this kind of approach to be applied to the Indian Ocean, there has been a particularly interesting boom in historical scholarship in the past years, and Thomas McDow’s Buying Time: Debt and Mobility in the Western Indian Ocean (Ohio University Press, 2018) is a book that is perhaps among the best examples of it that I have seen.
McDow studies nineteenth century movements between Oman and East Africa, while also observing how these interconnected regions also depended on wealth, expertise, and migrants from South Asia, other parts of the Middle East, and inner African states. To document the actions of Omani rulers (who also came to rule Zanzibar, and moved their capital to the island to firm up their interests along the East African coast), traders from Nyamwezi (the area south of Lake Victoria in present day Tanzania), and more “ordinary” migrants from Oman, and everyone in between, McDow studied legal contracts from archives in Zanzibar, and mapped out the connections they revealed.
His focus on these legal and economic transactions also reveals the power of kinship networks in facilitating people’s social and economic and physical mobility, their financial successes (or failures). I studied anthropology as an undergraduate and got some exposure to that discipline’s way of looking at kinship, which tended to be more rigid, and almost mathematical in calculating how structures of kin relations affected social and cultural life. Kinship as McDow brings it to life in the Indian Ocean was something altogether different. People were moving across this oceanic world at a time of tremendous social change--this was also the era when the British made their presence felt in the Indian Ocean, through anti-slavery campaigns, through their interest in the movement of Indian colonial subjects, and through their own colonialism in eastern Africa. The dynamism of the place and the period meant that kinship relations, as well as the identities associated with them (what did it mean to be Swahili? Or Zanzibari?) were fluid, complex, and unpredictable.
The book shifts scales very effectively, sometimes discussing large scale migration; sometimes focusing on Indian Ocean geopolitics; and also offering fascinatingly detailed portraits of historical actors. McDow also draws on some environmental history methodologies by documenting how environmental change and fluctuation in Oman was responsible for prompting some of the migration of people from coastal and interior Oman to coastal and interior eastern Africa.
This was a very complex but also rewarding piece of scholarship well worth a read for anyone interested in eastern Africa or the Indian Ocean world. As well as the contracts in Zanzibar’s archives that McDow mined to tell this elaborate story, and the complex peopling of the region, this period of history left behind material remains. Among the structures on Zanzibar that testify to the significance of this era was one of the Omani ruler’s palaces--Beit Al Ajaib. Sadly, after years of neglect and some apparent corruption amidst a refurbishment, this structure collapsed in December. It is telling, however, that from a recognition of its history in the region, the government of Oman has pledged funds to reconstruct the tower of the palace.
