Fahad Ahmad Bishara. A Sea of Debt

In the past few years, spurred by a significant broadening of the archive and interest in pushing beyond the “early modern” focus of much of the scholarship, research and writing on the Indian Ocean as a historical site of translocal and transregional connectivity has resulted in the publication of several important works that have reinvigorated the field. Indian Ocean studies has thus become increasingly an established subfield of the burgeoning fields of oceanic and global history. The new book by Fahad Ahmad Bishara, A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780–1950, is an important addition to the growing literature on the Indian Ocean because of its insights into the study of the commercial cultures that were active along its waterways in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A Sea of Debt provides compelling evidence and arguments that challenge understandings of the intersections between Islamic jurisprudence and economic life through a focus on the everyday practices and mechanisms utilized by merchants—predominantly from Kachchh in western India—as they transacted with one another between Muscat and elsewhere in Oman, India, and Zanzibar in ever more complex ways from the 1820s and 1830s. These transactional practices centered around socially and legally embedded relationships of credit and debt that in turn created skeins of obligation that allowed for the movements of goods—such as ivory and cloves—over vast oceanic and terrestrial distances

Debt · Economics · Economy · Geography · Obligation · Political science · Scholarship · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law