The consolidation and reformation of empires in the Middle East defined the nineteenth century in the region. While scholars have paid considerable attention to the expansion of the Qajar and Saudi states, the centralizing reforms of the Ottoman Empire, and the consolidation of British rule in India, the growing Arab polity based in Muscat has received comparably less attention. Yet by 1850, the Sultanate of Muscat had grown to encompass several key ports around the Western Indian Ocean, from Arabia and the Persian Gulf to India and Africa and an equally-dazzling mélange of Arab, Indian, Swahili and Baloch merchants, planters, qadis, soldiers and seamen, all of whom contributed to forging the frontiers of a shared world. The interlinked worlds of commerce, law and politics that these actors created endured for at least a century after the dismemberment of the Omani Empire in 1856 into the separate Sultanates of Muscat and Zanzibar.
Individually, the papers in this panel assess the different actors and processes that comprised Oman’s empire in the Indian Ocean. The first explores the process of Omani expansion into East Africa during the 19th century, examining the role played by mid-level juridical actors like scribes and qadis in giving a legal shape to Omani commercial expansion into the continent. The second paper examines the role of mercenaries from Baluchistan in sustaining the political integrity of the Omani empire in the region, posing broader questions about the nature of sovereignty in the Gulf and Indian Ocean, both in the 19th century and today. The third paper moves to Omani-controlled Makran during the apex of the British Empire in the Western Indian Ocean to explore how a labor force oriented towards work on dhows adapted to the introduction of steam navigation in the Indian Ocean. The final paper examines the movement of actors between Africa, India and Arabia, highlighting the dexterity with which they made use of a burgeoning imperial legal framework to consolidate trans-oceanic ties.
This panel reassesses the Omani Empire in the Western Indian Ocean by combining insights from anthropology and new historical approaches. Together, the papers move away from histories of rulers and battles and instead illustrate how a loose alliance of commercial, juridical and political actors from around the coasts of the Middle East, South Asia and East Africa shaped the contours of Oman’s empire in the Indian Ocean.
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Mr. Fahad Bishara
From at least the beginning of the 19th century, Omani merchants and planters and their Indian financiers had been settling 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 property rights regime that operated largely outside of state structures. By fashioning enduring bonds of debt and obligation with one another, they were able to mitigate the risks associated with trade, and in the process tied together the distant shores of this vast oceanic world of commerce. A central component in the making of this world was law, which furnished the concepts and instruments necessary to organize migration, commerce and settlement between Oman and East Africa, and which provided a philosophy to the nature and shape of the obligations that ran through it, and the institutions that governed it.
Drawing on legal instruments from Oman and East Africa and combining them with manuals of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) and legal opinions, (fatawa), this paper explores how ideas of law, encapsulated in the written obligation, the waraqa (literally, “paper”), traveled through across the Western Indian Ocean during the 19th century. As a commercial and legal instrument, the waraqa gave articulation to the bonds of obligation that tied commercial actors in as far-flung areas as Tanganyika and the Omani interior together. At the same time, it also gave these bonds a legal shape, drawing on a long genealogy of Islamic commercial jurisprudence to ground these networks in an Islamicate legal episteme. And as commercial actors moved from Oman to the East African coast, and into the interior, they brought these concepts along with them in the form of the waraqas they carried with them and the groups of actors that gave shape to them. The waraqa thus gives us a window into a history of non-state commercial and juridical expansion across an ocean that historians are only beginning to appreciate.
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Mr. Thomas F. McDow
The Omani empire controlled port cities and hinterlands in Arabia and the Persian Gulf; on the Makran Coast; and along the East African littoral. During the first half of the nineteenth century the process of consolidating Omani rule relied upon the movement between and among nodes of empire of a multiethnic cast of characters: Arab princes and traders, Gujarati financiers and petty hawkers, Baluchi merchants and mercenaries, and African laborers and wives, among others. Indeed, one could argue that Muscat became isolated as the margins increasingly constituted the empire.
In the latter half of the century, however, British diplomacy and naval power sundered Muscat from Zanzibar and began policing the sea lanes upon which the Omani dominions relied. At the same time, British consular officials oversaw a documentary regime of passes and permissions that simultaneously facilitated and controlled the movement of Africans across the Indian Ocean. Whereas Arabs, Indians, and Baluchis continued to move between and through ports in the region with relative ease, British officials subjected the movement of Africans to a great deal more scrutiny. Yet their consular acts were unable to stamp out mobility, and Arab, Baluchi, and Indian people navigated the burgeoning imperial legal frameworks through subterfuge to move African clients, wives, children, and slaves to Oman, the Makran Coast, and India. Falsified documents, insincere manumissions, and claims of kinship undermined the recent imposition of a British imperial legal framework.
This paper scrutinizes labor contracts, ships crews, and consular registries to understand what legitimated African travel and made possible the movement of Africans, especially manumitted slaves, from East Africa to Arabia and India. As such it argues that the same exchanges and migrations that constituted the Omani empire persisted long after British cooptation in both Muscat and Zanzibar.
Methodologically this paper is built on close analysis of a variety of archival materials. Sources include consular registers, contracts, letters, and legal cases in Arabic and English from the Zanzibar Archives; correspondence in the Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai; and documents from India Office Records in London.
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Mr. Ameem Lutfi
In early 2011 just as the ‘Arab spring’ reached the shores of the Kingdom of Bahrain, the Bahraini state brutally came down on the protesters lining the streets via security forces. Interestingly, over 35% of these security forces were composed of ethnic Balochs from the coastal region of Makran located in the Pakistani province of Balochistan. This paper looks to situate the current Balochs in the Bahraini security forces in a longer historical tradition of Makrani Baloch serving as mercenaries in the Indian Ocean; a role that came to be solidified with the rise of Omani Empire in the Indian Ocean. Particularly since the Makrani Coastal town of Gawadar was awarded to Said bin Sultan Al Bu Saidi in the early 19th century, Baloch mercenaries emerge as an increasingly important component of the Omani Empire; essential not only for curbing intertribal skirmishes in the Gulf but also for establishing control over parts of East Africa.
On the basis of multi-sited ethnographic and archival field research in Zanzibar, Dar-es Salaam, Manama, Muscat, Gawadar and Karachi, the paper contributes to scholarship on the Indian Ocean by bringing to the forefront the largely ignored role of Baloch Mercenaries circulating between the circuits enabled by the Omani Empire. With the help of oral histories, genealogical charts, biographical and travel narratives, and state records, I ask: how was sovereignty inscribed on to the bodies of the mercenaries and how in turn were they inscribing the Sovereign’s claims? This I believe will help us in understanding the logics of sovereignty and systems of governance through which a non-territorial thalassocracy asserted itself in a region that extended from South Asia to East Africa. This unique configuration of sovereignty imposed both on and through the Balochs, challenges the assumed universality of the territorially based understanding of ‘Sovereignty’ emerging from the Colonial logic. The paper exhibits how particular forms of social relationships can serve as a foundation for constituting a state’s logic of sovereignty. It is this legacy of sovereignty constructed upon a particular social relationship that comes to be reflected in the use of Baloch security personal to crush the recent uprisings in Bahrain.
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Hafeez Jamali
Recent debates over the writing of history and ethnography in South Asia and the Middle East have asked whether categories such as transnationalism, globalism, and cosmopolitanism are adequate for thinking beyond the state-centric narratives and colonial governmentalities. Within this context, I trace the overlapping geographies of Mekran Coast in Balochistan Province, Pakistan with the larger Indian Ocean world to unsettle received ideas of the imperial and national borderlands as isolated ‘savage spaces’. The territorial boundaries of ethnic Baloch people inhabiting the Mekran Coast are confined to the sovereign states of Pakistan and Iran. Their lived and imagined geographies, however, traverse the vast oceanic expanse via Muscat (Oman) all the way to the clove-scented island of Zanzibar (Tanzania). Despite decades of Pakistani rule and immigration restrictions set up by Gulf Arab countries in the wake of the oil boom of 1970s, shards of these geographies trace an arc over the Indian Ocean through memory, nostalgia, and diasporic networks.
Blending oral narratives of Baloch fishermen and African-descent laborers with accounts from the colonial archive, this paper traces these remembered and lived geographies. I follow the movement of Baloch and African-descent bodies through raid, trade, and migration between Zanzibar, Muscat, Gwadar, and Karachi to show the emergent colonial geography being created by large scale infrastructure projects such as the Indo-European Telegraph Line, the North Western Railway Line, and the British India Steam Navigation Company's entry into the Persian Gulf. I suggest that these colonial projects influenced the economic and cultural landscape of port towns on the Mekran Coast and transformed the bodies of African descent people from a site of servitude to a site of 'free' colonial labor.
