On the face of it, Salem Al-'Arayyedh's life was an exceptional one. Born in Bombay into a family of Bahraini pearl merchants with branches in that city, Al-'Arayyedh spent his years as a young adult moving between the pearl trade and a clerkship in the Bombay-based firm of Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Upon his return to Bahrain in the 1920s, he was to pay a pivotal role in shaping the Bahraini court system, which at the time was still developing under the aegis of Great Britain, the shaikhdom's protector. He quickly rose to prominence both as a lawyer and administrator, and even developed a reputation as a tough schoolteacher. When placed within a regional context, however, Al-'Arayyedh's life illustrates broader historical transformations that were taking place. For decades prior to his arrival in Bahrain, the Indian Ocean was undergoing a process of legal transformation in which such far-flung and distant ports as Rangoon, Zanzibar, and Aden were being integrated into a common legal arena centered in Bombay. In this process, legal institutions developed in Bombay were extended into these ports, creating a legal cohesion under the British Empire that had never existed before. Although it was a relative late-comer, Bahrain was very much a part of this process, and cadres of legal personnel like Al-'Arayyedh helped integrate it firmly into this arena. Part of a much broader project on the legal transformation of the Indian Ocean region, this paper draws on the biography and writings of Al-'Arayyedh and places him within broader regional and historical currents to tell the story of legal change in Bahrain. My thesis is that his writings, which will be set against his upbringing in a transnational family network of pearl merchants so as to make clear the transnational dynamics that shaped his legal imaginary, envision the Gulf and Indian Ocean as a singular legal space. More broadly, I argue that it was through legal personnel like Al-'Arayyedh that British India was able to expand the frontiers of its empire of law in the Indian Ocean. By placing his experience within a much broader Middle Eastern and Indian Ocean context, the paper will dislodge the historiography of the Gulf from that of the Middle East and, as Al-'Arayyedh himself aimed, to integrate it more firmly into that of the Indian Ocean, while exploring the ways in which legal personnel directed the institutions and practices of empire.

This paper examines the realms of law, custom, and lineage that operated between Oman and East Africa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the 1830s, the Omani sultan Said b. Sultan al-Busaidi relocated his capital to the African island of Zanzibar. When he died in 1856, a succession dispute simmered between his heirs. British intervention in 1861 resulted in a treaty dividing the empire, affirming separate al-Busaidi rulers in Arabia and Zanzibar. The 1861 Canning Award, like the earlier Anglo-Omani treaties to end the slave trade, established in British minds a legal basis for intervention. Between Muscat and Zanzibar, British officials policed high politics, and the British Navy patrolled the Indian Ocean sea lanes. Thus as Sugata Bose argues, British officials established a unitary sovereignty to replace the layered and shared sovereignty that had characterized the Indian Ocean of an earlier period. At the level of individuals, however, the formal division of Arabian and African dominions did not stem the flow of migrants from impoverished Oman to the wealthy Swahili Coast. Overlapping commercial, legal, and kin networks continued to link the regions. Some benefitted from these as kinsmen's wealth from Africa expanded settlements in Oman. The same mobility, however, brought into question the efficacy of law and tradition in Oman, as Arabs in Zanzibar manipulated property holdings and water rights in Arabia to their advantage. Using standard Islamic legal practices--mortgages, time sales, and complete sales--Omanis in East Africa secured loans and raised capital for ventures abroad. Those left behind in Oman found their access to family property preempted by mortgages and contracts drawn in East Africa without their consent. As Omanis in Zanzibar took refuge in legal norms enforced by mixed (Ibab, Sunni, and British) courts, those in Arabia invoked custom to defend their access to resources. The thesis of this paper is that even as British imperial designs tightened controls to limit rulers in both Oman and Zanzibar, the mobility of individuals set against the heterodox legal possibilities of the Indian Ocean allowed new negotiations over land, law, and custom. This paper draws on two methodologies: analysis of archival materials and interpreting interviews. The sources include contracts, letters, and legal cases in Arabic and English from the Zanzibar Archives; documents from India Office Records in London; and interviews and family histories collected by the author in Oman, Tanzania, and Burundi.

In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith famously argued that free labor is cheaper than slave labor, and ever since the intersection of slavery and capitalism has been fertile ground for debate. While slavery in the Arab world was distinctive, British abolitionism in the Gulf was still permeated by capitalist conceptions of labor exchange. So British officials repeatedly found their paradigm inadequate to the realities of the Gulf, and their abolitionist zeal progressively degenerated into something far more self-serving. First, imperial officials were persuaded that the conditions of slavery in the Gulf were not particularly onerous, so their efforts were directed at the perverse market forces that fostered war in Africa to feed a spurious demand for labor in Arabia. Naval patrols were ordered to search for barracoons, slaving ships, and slave markets: the infrastructure of a trade in commoditized humanity. But slaves were shipped to the Gulf in small numbers, along with a variety of other cargo and were often consigned to a buyer well before their arrival. These slave traders operated through personalized forms of violence along particular social networks which easily circumvented efforts to stop a traffic in commoditized human beings. However, the partial successes of abolition had created a population of free laborers and the potential for a free market in labor. This potential was never realized, though, as liberated slaves were coerced by poverty and alienation from local social networks, into dependence on British administrators. Rather less motivated to develop a labor market than they were to punish the beneficiaries of the slave market, these administrators merely sent former slaves to sugar and clove plantations, or to Bombay to compete with Indians for jobs as servants or crewmen on British steamships. For British businesses, free labor was cheaper than slave labor, just not for the reasons that Adam Smith had envisioned. My thesis is that even as capitalist conceptions of labor exchange were central to the failings of the abolitionism in the Gulf, the development of an efficient labor market in the region was ultimately sacrificed to provide cheap labor for British businesses. This paper's methodology is historical analysis of archival records, and my sources are the Persian Gulf Residency files in the British Library (R/15) the Foreign Office and Admiralty files in the National Archives, Kew (ADM 127 and FO 84) and the Marine and Political Department records in the Maharashtra (Bombay) Archives.

This paper examines the British Persian Gulf Administration's policy of granting manumission certificates to fugitive slaves in the Gulf in the early twentieth century. Today, nearly a thousand manumission testimonies are preserved in the records of the British Persian Gulf Administration. These testimonies reveal details about slave origins and slave life. They also reflect the contradictory nature of British manumission policy in the Gulf. According to official policy, beginning in the first decade of the twentieth century, slaves could obtain legal manumission from slavery and receive a manumission certificate issued in English and Arabic from the British Political Resident at Bushire or one of the offices of the political agents or residency agents at Bahrain, Muscat, or Sharjah. This formal manumission was modeled on a mixture of Islamic manumission law from the Gulf, British manumission policy in the West Indies, and the legal tradition of British-occupied Egypt. In reality, fugitive slaves faced different circumstances at the varying locations. The agent at Sharjah, for example, was notorious for aiding fugitive Baluchi and Persian slaves but siding with masters in cases of African slaves. In the 1920s enslaved Africans from Abu Dhabi and Dubai would willingly walk more than 200 miles to Muscat rather than face the agent in nearby Sharjah. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate how the conflicting projects of liberal economics and liberal politics created a confused policy among British administrators toward manumission in the Gulf as reflected in the manumission documents from the early twentieth century. Torn between, on one hand, ending the slave trade and, on the other hand, maintaining the political status quo and Britain's generally weak control over coastal Eastern Arabia in the midst of the growing imperial ambitions of Russia, the Ottoman Empire, France and Germany, by maintaining the fragile economy that depended on slave labor, the British administration's policy wavered between half-hearted abolitionism and willful ignorance of slavery. The thesis of this paper is that the conflicted nature of British manumission policy in the Gulf resulted from the conflicting goals of the administration. For enslaved people in the Gulf, this conflicted policy presented challenging legal conditions which they managed to negotiate. This paper's methodology involves the documentary analysis of archival materials. The sources for this paper come in the form of documents in English and Arabic from the R/15 section of the India Office Records in the British Library, London, UK.