“Thinking about law and debt, too, forced me to contend with the question of who the agents of legal history were, in both the commercial spaces of the Indian Ocean and within the jurisdictions that the British Empire established for itself in the region.” Fahad Bishara on his scholarly journey to the book, A Sea of Debt.
I didn’t set out to write a legal history of debt in the Indian Ocean. When I first conceived of the project that would become A Sea of Debt, I wanted to write about trade networks in the Indian Ocean, trust, and how commercial matters played out in British courtrooms around the region. I was interested in the dynamics of merchant networks, and I had hoped to be able to explore some of them through the letters that merchants exchanged with one another. The problem, however, was that I never found the letters (and assumed, incorrectly, that too few had survived). As I went from one merchant family collection to another, I kept searching (it turns out, in the wrong places) for correspondence, but all I could turn up were contracts – first tens of them, then hundreds, and eventually thousands. At some point I had to abandon the merchant networks project and had to reconceive it based on what I did have: reams and reams of debt contracts, which they simply called waraqas, or paper.
What first felt like an unmitigated catastrophe turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me. Faced with an unexpected cache of mercantile paper, I had to reimagine how we might write histories of commerce in the Indian Ocean. And instead of constraining myself with abstract ideas like “networks” I had to train my focus on what I actually had in front of me – concrete material artifacts produced during the act of exchange that people felt were important enough to hold onto for more than a hundred years.
The contracts drew me to the law, but not in a way that I had expected to be. I had understood legal history to principally be an Anglo-American field. There were some exceptions, of course, but the bulk of the literature focused on the genealogies of different legal doctrines in the United States; those who were more inclined towards law and society also did excellent work on legal disputes, but principally in an American context. It was not clear what room there was for someone working on the Indian Ocean to include themselves in that conversation. On the other side of the corridor was the literature on Islamic legal history, which focused principally on specific ‘ulama and (mostly medieval) texts, or would take a concept like crime or reasonable doubt and trace it through a set of (again, mostly medieval) texts. In thinking about a socially-grounded history of law in Muslim society, I felt like I had few lifelines: reading Brinkley Messick’s The Calligraphic State was a watershed moment for me, but really, I had to find my inspiration elsewhere.
I was lucky. As I began writing my dissertation, I found myself in the company of a number of outstanding historians, all of whom were thinking about law in South Asia and the Indian Ocean in new and exciting ways: Mitra Sharafi, Rohit De, Mitch Fraas, Julia Stephens, Nurfadzilah Yahaya, Iza Hussin, Renisa Mawani, and others, all were writing legal histories around the Indian Ocean world that emphasized legal practice over doctrine and wove together questions of empire, state, and society in ways that rivaled (and indeed surpassed) the best works in American legal history. Through them I could see the possibility for a project that brought together questions of law and commerce in the Indian Ocean that anchored itself in specific materials, concepts, and practices. And as the dissertation slowly took the shape of a book, I came to learn of (and learn from) many others as well. The study of law, I came to appreciate, was much more than just doctrines and decisions and landmark cases that I knew little about. Law was woven into the fabric of society, economy, and politics; it was practically everywhere, and it was virtually impossible to ignore.
In A Sea of Debt, I grappled with the implications of this approach to doing legal history for the history of the Indian Ocean. As a legal concept, debt opened up doors for thinking about questions of personhood and property rights around the Indian Ocean. It allowed me to see how legal concepts were embedded in everyday contracting and documentation, and opened up the possibility to talk about a history of legal practice that was informed by (but, importantly, not constrained by) doctrine. It allowed for the possibility of an intercourse between legal ideas and legal practices – a process in which each was trying to move in the direction of the other. The distinction between “law in the books” and “law in action” was less clear than I had initially thought, and the dialogue between them was far more dynamic than I could have imagined.
Thinking about law and debt, too, forced me to contend with the question of who the agents of legal history were, in both the commercial spaces of the Indian Ocean and within the jurisdictions that the British Empire established for itself in the region. There were some obvious answers: jurists, qadis, and British judges, all of whom left an enormous paper trail in their wake. But in A Sea of Debt, there were other, less obvious protagonists as well: the katibs, or scribes, who mediated between the world of doctrine and practice in everyday commercial settings, and whose authorship underpinned virtually every transaction in this world. There were also the merchants themselves, many of whom posed questions on commerce to jurists, and who experimented with different forms of contracting in response to the demands of a changing market economy. And on the British imperial side of things, there were lawyers – scores of Indian and British lawyers who made their way into East Africa during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, whose claim-making in the courtroom and invocation of British Indian law helped forge new pathways for thinking about economy and society, and even Islamic law, in the region.
Law opened up the possibility for thinking about new forms of connection in the Indian Ocean, and new frontiers between theory and practice. But also opened up new points of tension to think through. Commerce was not always a kind game; the circulations that it engendered also brought with them frictions and fissures. As different legal actors crafted the framework for transregional commercial activity to take place, they also had to contend with the moments of rupture that would inevitably come – the courtroom battles and competing claims about credit, debt, law, and empire that actors voiced as they fought over money and property they felt they were owed. When we read these histories from the courtroom, we see the ways in which macro-level events and transformations – wars, crises, global economic downturns – reverberated at the micro level.
In a past life, I called the waraqas I worked on in A Sea of Debt narrative flotation devices (or something like that), by way of signaling how they allowed me to move between the coasts of Arabia and East Africa, and between the realms of legal thought and practice. But in truth, they allowed me to do much more. By focusing on waraqas, I managed to see the macro in the micro – to see how large-scale concepts and processes played out in everyday settings. By reading about the contestations around the waraqa, I could see how everyday people thought about the processes they engaged in. And by thinking through the material artifacts that actors drew up and exchanged in their transactions with one another, I was able to move away from abstractions like “networks” and see new histories of law and economic life play out, on the ground and across the water, in a transregional arena.
Fahad Ahmad Bishara
Fahad Ahmad Bishara is Associate Professor of History and of Arabian Peninsula and Gulf Studies at the University of Virginia. He specializes in the economic and legal history of the Indian Ocean and Islamic world, and has written a number of articles on the topic, along with his book A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780-1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2017). He is currently at work on a connected history of the Gulf and Indian Ocean told through the voyages of a Kuwaiti dhow in the early 20th century.