From the beginning of the 19th century, Omani merchants and planters and their Indian financiers had been settling in East Africa in growing numbers, as they sought to participate in the increasingly lucrative ivory and slave trades and a burgeoning plantation economy. Faced with a state that was unable to extend its authority beyond the walls of its capital, an informal grouping of commercial and juridical actors fashioned a legal framework for economic life that operated largely outside of state structures. Debt formed a central component of this commercial and legal world: it facilitated access to the capital necessary to fuel economic activity, but also provided intellectual fodder for Muslim thinkers, generating a philosophy on the nature and shape of the commercial obligations that ran through the Western Indian Ocean. This paper combines extant debt acknowledgment deeds from Muscat and Zanzibar with the fatwas of Sa‘id bin Khalfan Al-Khalili, Oman’s premier 19th-century mufti, to chart the juristic construction of debt and legal personhood in the Western Indian Ocean during a period of emerging modern capitalism. It explores how jurists constructed the individual legal subject – a subject they imagined as existing primarily in a set of property relations and commercial obligations. More importantly, it examines how jurists were willing to stretch the temporal boundaries of debt to transcend those of life itself, erecting a framework wherein commercial obligations and the real property they were grounded in would be passed down between generations of debtors and creditors. More broadly, the paper calls for a rethinking of the place of Islamic law in economic life at a time of emerging modern capitalism, arguing that jurists were amply willing to construct a legal artifice to accommodate the demands of a growing commercial arena.