Buying Time: Debt and Mobility in the Western Indian Ocean (New African Histories)

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 people—Africans, Indians, and Arabs; men and women; free and slave—who 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.

• Celestial Bodies
• Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism, Commerce and Islam
• Governing Islam: Law, Empire, and Secularism in Modern South Asia
• Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama since 1800 (Cambridge Middle East Studies)
• Family Life in the Ottoman Mediterranean: A Social History
• Oceanic Histories (Cambridge Oceanic Histories)
• Street Archives and City Life: Popular Intellectuals in Postcolonial Tanzania (Radical Perspectives)
• A Sea of Debt: Law And Economic Life In The Western Indian Ocean, 1780–1950 (Asian Connections)
• Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post-Abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890–1945 (Eastern African Studies)
• Slavery and Islam