ISBN:
978-0-8214-2282-3
,
978-0-8214-2281-6
Language:
English
Pages:
xiii, 364 Seiten
,
Illustrationen, Karten
Series Statement:
New African Histories
DDC:
967.601
Keywords:
Ost-Afrika Indischer Ozean
;
Oman
;
Sansibar
;
Geschichte
;
Handel
;
Sklavenhandel
;
Mobilität
;
Finanzwesen
;
Tippu Tip (1837-1905)
Abstract:
In Buying Time, Thomas F. McDow synthesizes Indian Ocean, Middle Eastern, and East African studies as well as economic and social history to explain how, in the nineteenth century, credit, mobility, and kinship knit together a vast interconnected Indian Ocean region. That vibrant and enormously influential swath extended from the desert fringes of Arabia to Zanzibar and the Swahili coast and on to the Congo River watershed.In the half century before European colonization, Africans and Arabs from coasts and hinterlands used newfound sources of credit to seek out opportunities, establish new outposts in distant places, and maintain families in a rapidly changing economy. They used temporizing strategies to escape drought in Oman, join ivory caravans in the African interior, and build new settlements.The key to McDow`s analysis is a previously unstudied trove of Arabic business deeds that show complex variations on the financial transactions that underwrote the trade economy across the region. The documents list names, genealogies, statuses, and clan names of a wide variety of peopleAfricans, Indians, and Arabs; men and women; free and slavewho bought, sold, and mortgaged property. Through unprecedented use of these sources, McDow moves the historical analysis of the Indian Ocean beyond connected port cities to reveal the roles of previously invisible people.
Description / Table of Contents:
Introduction: Temporizing across the Indian Ocean -- Chapter 1. Drought and new mobilities in the Omani interior -- Chapter 2. The customs masters and customs of credit in Zanzibar -- Chapter 3. Sultans at sea: mobility and the Omani states -- Chapter 4. Halwa and identity in the western Indian Ocean world -- Chapter 5. Tippu Tip's kin, from Oman to the eastern Congo -- Chapter 6. Freed slaves : manumission and mobility before 1873 -- Chapter 7. Acts for consuls and consular acts: documents, manumission, and ocean travel after 1873 -- Chapter 8. A dhow on Lake Victoria -- Chapter 9. "Everything is pledged to its time": Salih bin Ali, debt, and rebellion in the Omani interior -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
