Based on extensive fieldwork and pioneering research in public and (especially) private repositories of the Sahara, this work reconstructs the organization and development of a nineteenth-century trading diaspora in the northwestern Sahara. Allied with fellow Amazigh (“Berber”) clans as well as with Jewish merchants, traders moved cloth, ostrich feathers, salt, slaves and, most importantly for Lydon, paper, across the desert. Using family and court records, a breathtaking number of interviews, and a vast knowledge of Islam and northwest Africa's religious cultures, Lydon's lengthy book provides a wealth of information about the trans-Saharan trade on the eve of colonial conquest and will serve as a benchmark.
Lydon contributes to the burgeoning Saharan Studies movement. Illustrating just how productive conceiving of West Africa and the Maghrib as part of a single unit can be, she highlights the broader links between trade networks and household economies on the edge of the desert, thereby revealing the crucial role of women in long-distance commerce. Lydon's reconstruction of family finances adds to an emerging consensus that while the dramatic caravans of tens of thousands of camels that attracted the attention of early modern observers may have died out in the nineteenth century, the trade itself continued in a more dispersed, opportunistic vein during a period of intense uncertainty and violence linked to religious transformation. Several scholars have identified the persistent connections between Muslim Sufi orders and the organization of the Saharan trade, but the precise nature of these links has remained debatable. Lydon suggests that the expansion of the paper trade associated with Islamic reform and revival movements of the time facilitated decentralization by improving record keeping even as the violence that often erupted during disputes over reform threatened the profitability of large ventures. This period may have also seen the emergence of a kind of identity consumerism among Muslims in which purchasing paper and funerary and personal cloths from desert merchants became intertwined with religious status.
These are enticing theories, though it may be difficult to distinguish actual changes from increases in the production of records, especially given the lack of quantitative data and continuing uncertainties about preceding centuries. Lydon associates the expansion of record keeping with the expansion of Islam itself. Despite great progress in recent years, too little is yet known about the history and organization of pre-Islamic trade in the region to evaluate the effects of Islamization in the longue durée. To counter this, Lydon uses Islamic reform as a proxy for Islamization more generally; this is intriguing but does not fully assuage anxieties that the debate overly reifies Islam itself.
Two of the book's arguments will be of great interest to readers of CSSH. In suggesting that increases in paper trade transformed not just the organization of trade but also what it meant to be Muslim, Lydon attaches great importance to Arabic (and ajami) literacy. But an unresolved tension runs through the book between a Goody-esque or Ong-ian sense of writing as a coherent and dramatic causal force and an Illich-ian recognition that literacy is always embedded in a wider set of communicative practices. Paper stored the details of Saharan contracts, but whenever disputes arose (especially in settling estates) only the oral testimony of “trustworthy” witnesses was decisive. Historical anthropologies of Muslim societies have revealed a wide range of ways the authority of texts shifted during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and Lydon's account lies somewhere in the middle of a continuum. Texts mattered, but rather than serving as a technology for storing and preserving truth, writing provided aides-mémoire and graphic representations of the social networks that themselves generated truth through oral pronouncements. Yet despite this important insight and despite the extensive interviewing, Lydon's depiction remains an extraordinarily textual one, in which the self-representations of those who wrote are taken to stand in for the crucial processes of society as a whole. Nonetheless, Lydon's treatment of the social, material, and intellectual resources of this group is very convincing, revealing the practices that sustained an important nexus of social identity, practical bureaucracy, spiritual guidance, and institutional reproduction that constituted what she terms a “paper economy of faith.”
The book also makes tentative contributions to theories of trade. Tempering “new institutionalism” with an analysis of “legal culture,” Lydon joins those who seek internal characteristics of Muslim social institutions (and, behind those, religious institutions) to account for the specific evolution of regional economies. She considers the vesting of authority primarily in the trustworthiness (amâna) of the parties involved in agreements to be “an inherent problem in the practice and the precept of Islam” (382). Since the ultimate arbiters of amâna were religious specialists, the longevity of trans-Saharan trade reflected the resilience of what were essentially broadly shared religio-cultural attitudes. But the irreducible role of faith was also, she claims, responsible for the failure to resolve long-term information asymmetries, the tendency for factional conflict in times of insecurity, and the inability of traders to establish stable collaborative ventures along the lines of the European firm. Still, Lydon's important attempt to bring semiotics, psychology, epistemology, and religion into the analysis of economic rationality too often rests on undefined terms like “culture,” “proof,” “evidence,” and “faith” that become placeholders for processes still imperfectly understood and insufficiently historicized. Those invested in formal models of economic activity may thus find Lydon's revisions difficult to incorporate; those of a more constructivist bent may be frustrated by the uncritical use of concepts; and political economists may be unconvinced that significant causality lies in such local forces. Nonetheless, Lydon's arguments are provocative contributions to evolving debates on Islamic economies and economic anthropology.
