Credit, Debt and Modern Capitalism in Oman and the Western Indian Ocean, circa 1790–1850

Before delving into the legal architecture of economic life in the Western Indian Ocean, it is useful to consider the changes taking place in the region during the nineteenth century. The fact that Al-Khalili's correspondents, who asked him for advice on changing commercial trends in their plantations, hailed from the interior of Oman might be surprising to those who consider the Arabian interior's physical distance from the Indian Ocean as forming a barrier to the currents of maritime trade in the region. The truth, however, could not be more different: through the port cities of Qalhat, Sur, and Sohar, the Omani interior bore witness to movements of goods and people to and from Africa, India, and as far away as China, from at least the medieval period onwards. At different periods, but particularly following their defeat of the Portuguese around the Western Indian Ocean, Omanis from the interior also established small chiefdoms along the South Arabian and East African coasts.Footnote ¹⁰

The arrival of the nineteenth century, however, marked a sea change in Oman's place in the commercial circuits of the Western Indian Ocean. During this time, the region became firmly integrated into the world economy, as commodities from Omani holdings around the Indian Ocean began to make their way to markets in South Asia, Europe, and the United States in an unprecedented way. And as old goods began to find their way to new markets, the structures of finance that propelled goods around the Indian Ocean shifted in response to the changing opportunities and constraints that the new commercial order established. What emerged during the nineteenth century was a new economic world: one characterized by an increased scale and scope of commercial activity, and, more importantly, of credit.

Perhaps the first Indian Ocean commodity to experience these tremendous shifts was East African ivory. Historians have already outlined the expansions in the ivory market during the early to mid-nineteenth century, partly because of the rise in English demand for ivory. Although East African merchants had been exporting ivory to India and China for centuries, the emergence of England as a market for ivory, in one historian's words, “rejuvenated East Africa's trade with India and broadened the arteries without altering the direction of trade as far as East Africa was concerned.”Footnote ¹¹ By the middle of the nineteenth century, Omani and Swahili merchants witnessed the development of an international commodity chain between the interior of East Africa, the productive hinterland, Zanzibar, the regional ivory entrepôt, Bombay, the processing station, and London, the main market.Footnote ¹²

Historians detail similar expansions in the clove market at the time, demonstrating that although clove exports were low during the early 1800s, they enjoyed an enormous boom during the middle of the century. During the 1840s, many Omani Arab merchants began to invest in clove plantations, giving rise to what one historian has termed the “clove mania” of Zanzibar.Footnote ¹³ By 1860, cloves rivaled ivory as East Africa's main export to India; their export soared from 9,000 frasilas (almost 143,000 kg) in 1839–40 to nearly sixteen times that amount in 1856.Footnote ¹⁴

In Oman itself, the market for dates expanded in important ways during the 1880s, reaching consumers in Europe and America. Drawing his figures from British intelligence reports, one historian argues that the Gulf began to export dates in much greater quantities than before, following the establishment of markets abroad: markets whose supply depended largely upon the sinews forged by the advent of steamships and telegraph.Footnote ¹⁵ Between 1899 and 1906, the earliest years for which there are published figures, Muscat's date exports nearly doubled, from more than £52,000–92,500 (in today's British pounds, from more than £5,000,000 to nearly £9,000,000) peaking at more than £103,000 in 1902–3.Footnote ¹⁶

Financing these waves of commercial expansion were Indian merchants. From the shores of Gujarat, they fanned outwards into all of the region's major ports: Muscat, Aden, Zanzibar, Mombasa, Bahrain, and Bushire. By the mid-nineteenth century, these merchants had already developed a reputation as the principal financiers in the Western Indian Ocean. On his visit to Zanzibar in 1857, Richard Burton wrote that they were “the merchants par excellence of Zanzibar” adding that “they command the inland trade, sending, where they themselves do not care to travel, Arabs and Waswahili [Swahili people] to conduct their caravans.”Footnote ¹⁷ In the clove and plantations of East Africa, the Indian shopkeeper-cum-moneylender was a common part of the commercial landscape. He often moved to the countryside after having secured a creditor of his own, usually a larger merchant in the town, from whom he would receive cash and goods on credit. He then parceled the goods and cash out among the farmers and landowners in his area and collected his debts in produce at harvest time.Footnote ¹⁸

The same was true in Oman. Although a marked increase in agricultural exports took place there later than in East Africa, by the end of the nineteenth century the mercantile firms of Ratansi Purshottam, a native of Kutch, and W.J. Towell, an American firm with a local Khoja Indian partner, Mohammed Fadl, featured prominently in the trade in dates from the villages surrounding Muscat to India and America.Footnote ¹⁹ Purshottam's papers suggest long-standing credit relationships with Omani middlemen, who would go into the surrounding villages and pay date growers deposits for their orders after negotiating the price, quantity, and quality of the dates.Footnote ²⁰

What distinguished Indian merchants from others was their access to regional credit networks. Their unmatched ability to channel capital among India, Arabia, and Africa, and the mercantile and familial ties they enjoyed with merchant houses in India and the rest of the Indian Ocean, rendered them uniquely positioned to control all finance, commercial or otherwise, in the region. Burton wrote that many Indians of East Africa were able to monopolize the trade in ivory because they could “cash drafts upon Zanzibar, Mandavi [Mandvi, a port in Gujarat], and Bombay; provide outfits, supply guards and procure the Pagazi, or porters, who are mostly their employees.”Footnote ²¹ The Indians of Muscat, also, were able to channel credit from India to the resource-poor port, stimulating the production of dates and textiles there.Footnote ²² Even in the ports of the Persian coast, in Bushire, Lingah, and Bandar ‘Abbas (which the Omani Sultan leased between 1780 and 1868) Indians played an important role in financing the upcountry caravan trade in cotton and textiles.Footnote ²³

In addition to linking the ports and hinterlands of the Indian Ocean together into a coherent system of trade and finance, Indian merchants occupied the frontier between an Indian Ocean regional market and the burgeoning world economy, channeling goods from Zanzibari and Omani plantations to Western Indian storefronts. Moreover, they ensured that the finished products of Manchester, Bombay, and other industrial centers made their way to consumers in those regional (and sometimes very rural) markets. From the perspectives of most debtors, Indian finance often translated into access to cloth, foods, beads, and other trinkets from the Subcontinent and wider world: goods that increasingly formed necessary elements of social life in the Western Indian Ocean. By the late nineteenth century, observers described how Omanis in East Africa had developed a taste for luxuries and imported goods, and described how “their homes were decorated with expensive Persian carpets, gilded mirrors, chandeliers, fine china, and glassware.”Footnote ²⁴ These goods were not simply for conspicuous consumption; along the caravan routes of the East African interior, Arab traders bartered printed Indian calicos and beads produced in New England for ivory, and observers noted the shifting tastes of African consumers.Footnote ²⁵

Concerns surrounding credit, debt, and consumption featured regularly among questions posed to Al-Khalili for his guidance. In a commentary on debt in Omani society, the jurist distinguished between two broad classes of debtors and their practices of conspicuous consumption: those who were wealthy enough to fulfill their obligations to their creditors, and those who were not. A debtor of the first category, he argued, could take on as much debt as he wanted to “with no comment or embarrassment.” Being in a situation of power and privilege, “no harm follows his transactions [lā ḍarar yalḥaq fi mu‘āmalātih], for he takes and provides [bal ya'khudh wa yaqḍī], and deals and gives [wa yataṣarraf wa-ya‘ṭī], and he is bound by his obligations and moves quickly to fulfill them [wa-sā‘an fil-khilās].”

More surprising, however, was his assertion that the second class—“the weak—not in health, but in ability to fulfill their obligations to their creditors”—also had the right to borrow, for even the poor had to entertain guests and sometimes live slightly beyond their means. Although members of that class needed to economize (yaqtaṣid) when it came to such expenditures, there was no reason to cut them off completely from the world of consumer goods and conspicuous consumption.Footnote ²⁶ Consumer debt, it seemed, had by the nineteenth century formed an indispensable part of sociability in Oman.

Rethinking Property in an Age of Capitalism

Underpinning the Indian Ocean markets for agricultural, commercial, and consumer credit was a robust market in property. In their attempts to capture emerging commercial opportunities, a wide range of debtors capitalized their property. Merchants and planters in South Arabia and East Africa mobilized whatever property they could get their hands on, to pawn against the loans they needed to participate in a commercial arena that seemed to only grow as the years went by. Even newly manumitted slaves mortgaged properties; usually mud huts or plots of clove trees that they received from their former masters, but sometimes also slaves that they themselves owned.Footnote ²⁷ For growing numbers of commercial aspirants, property, and the credit it allowed access to, held the key to socioeconomic mobility.

For many Indian financiers, the property they received against the loans was more than just collateral: it contained the very commercial object their firms dealt, be it dates, cloves, or copra, and, therefore, had value that they could continually extract, year after year. Seen from the perspective of the Indian firm, then, loans were not meant to be repaid as such, but were mobilized to secure access to the plantation's crop, which the firm would then forward to their trading partners in India; hence Al-Khalili's correspondent's observation that “the yield was separated from the property owners.” Omani planters could stay on their plantations and could enjoy the luxuries that Indian merchants would bring to them, but the plantation's crop (as I will explain in greater detail) was no longer theirs to consume or sell.

For inhabitants in the Omani interior, then, the nineteenth century would have brought with it noticeable economic, social, and political changes, all of which reshaped their relationship to land and their property. Like the Mazru‘is mentioned at the beginning of this article, many Omanis who had migrated to East Africa in search of commercial fortune drew on properties at home to finance their new lives abroad. For example, when, in 1874, the Zanzibari Arab merchant Sa‘id bin ‘Umar Al-Kharusi borrowed the princely sum of MTD 5,200 from the Indian Wala Banji for 1 year, he hypothecated his date plantation in his ancestral homeland of Wadi Bani Kharus in Oman, just outside of Muscat.Footnote ²⁸ Three years later, in the fall of 1877, another Zanzibari Arab merchant Salim bin ‘Ali Al-Sughri borrowed MTD 3,300 from the customs master Lakmidas Ladha, offering as collateral his properties in Al-Sharqiyya, the Eastern province of Oman.Footnote ²⁹

The effects of the expanding Omani commercial and political presence in East Africa during the nineteenth century were thus made clear at home. The date trade would have already seen some expansion into growing markets in East Africa, but, more importantly, the changing fortunes of Omanis on the East African coast and interior would have allowed them to expand their urban and agricultural holdings at home.Footnote ³⁰ By the middle of the nineteenth century, then, Omanis living in the country's interior would have already begun to mobilize vehicles through which they could extract and circulate value from the land around them. These changes reflected themselves in the sense of urgency surrounding changing Omani commercial and legal practices that jurists such as Al-Khalili confronted on a daily basis.

Having lived in Oman throughout the expansions that characterized the nineteenth century, the Ibadhi jurist Sa‘id bin Khalfan Al-Khalili was well aware of the commercial and legal practices that his countrymen had grown accustomed to. Al-Khalili was Oman's leading jurist during the mid-nineteenth century, and although his zeal for Ibadhism cast him as a controversial figure in the annals of history—he supported the establishment of a short-lived imamate on the coast, which briefly overthrew the government of the sultan of Muscat, an intrigue for which he was later executed—nobody could question his impeccable juristic credentials.Footnote ³¹ Omanis from all walks of life—merchants, farmers, qadis, and rulers—frequently came to him for legal advice on how to conduct or regulate a range of commercial transactions. Unsurprisingly, the majority revolved around questions of land, value, and rent, and, perhaps most importantly, the emerging contractual forms and legal instruments used to facilitate their circulation within a burgeoning economic arena. Throughout, Al-Khalili (but also other jurists like him) acted as the Omanis’ moral compass: although he was eager to facilitate the changing forms of contracting that modern capitalism demanded, he carefully grounded them in a universe of rights, obligations, and ontologies that he saw as both familiar and equitable—and, more fundamentally, natural.

Of all of the contractual forms utilized in nineteenth century Oman and East Africa, none attracted his attention more than the khiyār sale. Broadly speaking, the khiyār functioned as a form of pawnship: a planter or commercial aspirant would “sell” their property to a lender for an agreed-upon price (i.e., the loan amount), which they would have to repay within a specified time frame in order to reclaim the property, thus rendering the initial sale void. By the mid-nineteenth century, the khiyār sale had emerged as the preferred vehicle among the Arabs of South Arabia and East Africa to raise capital for commercial ventures or money for consumption.Footnote ³² Public and private archives and qadi registers from both regions house thousands of khiyār sale waraqas (deeds), and questions to jurists such as Al-Khalili (and those that came after him) often involved concerns surrounding the khiyār sale and the waraqa, either separately or together. Waraqas and the practices surrounding them even the attention of Europeans in the region: British consuls frequently commented on their usage in finance, and decades later, the British court in Zanzibar would hear hundreds of khiyār-related disputes.Footnote ³³

The khiyār sale was by no means a new invention. Muslim jurists originally conceived of it as a regular sale contract with the option (khiyār) for either party to rescind the contract within a specified period of time, usually no more than 3 days; in a sale contract, this usually afforded the buyer protections against defective merchandise.Footnote ³⁴ By the seventeenth century, however, some jurists began showing some flexibility toward the time period allowed. Oman's leading jurist during the mid-seventeenth century argued that different objects should be allowed a different khiyār period: although sales in animals were subject to the standard 3 day rule, sales of clothes should be allowed only 1 or 2 days, and the purchaser of a room or house should be given at least a month.Footnote ³⁵

However, by the time Al-Khalili sat down to pen his opinions in the mid-nineteenth century, economic and juridical actors understood the khiyār very differently—as an option for a seller (or, more accurately, a debtor) to redeem the property within a specified time frame—usually whatever length of time the operation itself required. In the interim, the buyer (i.e., the lender) retained the right to the produce, harvesting and selling it until the redemption date. Khiyār sales of clove plantations in Zanzibar, for example, would not exceed 6 months (the time between two harvests), whereas sales of land as security against ivory might involve a period of 1 or 2 years. Moreover, commercial actors frequently extended the timeframe of khiyār contracts beyond what even they had originally agreed to if both the buyer and seller deemed it exigent. The demands of emerging modern capitalism, it seemed, expanded the contractual time that undergirded the khiyār option toward horizons more appropriate to prevailing commercial and agricultural cycles, thereby reformulating the purpose of the khiyār altogether.

In his answers to questions surrounding the khiyār's timeframe, Al-Khalili seemed both sympathetic to the needs of his audience but also all too willing to give them the leeway necessary to perform whatever temporal sleight of hand they required. “The [khiyār] timeframe expansion and its contraction is all permissible,” he wrote, though he added that “the shorter the timeframe the better.”Footnote ³⁶ He did not even grumble about the growing practice of passing down the khiyār arrangement from one generation to another. For Al-Khalili, khiyār-based relationships between creditors and debtors that spanned multiple generations, lasting for as long as 50 years (a time frame unimaginable in its original conception), were legally valid.Footnote ³⁷ Here, the jurist displayed one of his many signs of willingness to accommodate the needs and changing practices of an expanding commercial society.

Al-Khalili voiced few objections to general practices surrounding khiyār sales around the Indian Ocean by the mid-nineteenth century, even when his questioners claimed that they amounted to interest-bearing loans, as a number did. One correspondent noted that “the khiyār sale has spread these days, and has appeared in all regions,” expressing concern that “it has become ladder to usury [sullaman ilā akl al-ribā], and the general public [al-‘āmma] have taken to it without a proper contract or permissible direction [bilā ‘aqd ṣaḥīḥ wa lā wajh mubīḥ].”Footnote ³⁸ Critics of the khiyār sale frequently likened it to a usurious loan, pointing to the moneylender's right to the harvest in the interim period as a thinly disguised form of interest, though they sometimes admitted that it was less of a sin to borrow than lend under those circumstances.Footnote ³⁹ Al-Khalili, however, was not so quick to dismiss the khiyār: the practice of lending and borrowing via khiyār, he wrote, was unimpeachable, noting that reputable Omani jurists made use of the khiyār to make short-term purchases if it helped the seller (i.e., the debtor).Footnote ⁴⁰ The usage of the khiyār as a vehicle for loans, then, was perfectly acceptable for those who needed them.

Faced with a series of questions surrounding the khiyār buyer's right to the plantation's harvest—a right that would have amounted to interest on the loan disguised as the sale amount—Al-Khalili reframed the question as one of agricultural ontology. He asserted that if a buyer purchased a property through the vehicle of the khiyār with the intention of owning the property, rather than simply to access its yield, then he was permitted to harvest the yield during the khiyār period. In so doing, Khalili drew an ontological distinction between the land and its yield; the latter could not form a separate object of sale, but the former could, as a sale of land necessarily included a sale of its produce.Footnote ⁴¹

His creative reformulation of the issues of saleability and contract owed much to the work of an earlier thinker: the seventeenth century jurist Khamis bin Sa‘id Al-Shaqṣi Al-Rustaqi, whose reflections on the question of value in an agrarian economy formed the ontological basis for Al-Khalili's jurisprudential gymnastics. In his discussion of the legal dimensions of the sale of palms, seedlings and trees, Al-Shaqṣi began with the outright declaration that “whoever bought from another a palm whose fruit has matured [qad balaghat thamratuhā]… then that is permissible [fa lā ba'sa bi-dhālik] if he intended to buy the palm itself along with its fruit [aṣl al-nakhl bi-thamratihā],” even for a delayed payment.Footnote ⁴² Al-Shaqṣi was able to clear the way for this sort of transaction by drawing an ontological distinction between the tree and its produce as objects of a sale contract. In a sale of a date-palm with a seedling (ṣarm), he argued, the seedling had to be treated as though it were fruit: if it had matured it belonged to the seller, but if it was too young to be uprooted then it belong to the buyer.Footnote ⁴³ For Al-Shaqṣi, it was as much a question of use-value as of nature itself: just as one could not sell a palm without the ground on which it stood, through which it accessed the water, one could not sell unripe produce separately from the tree it depended on to survive. The palm formed part of its essence (dhāt), just as the ground formed part of the palm's essence; only when something could naturally exist on its own could it form a separate sale object.Footnote ⁴⁴

By combining Al-Shaqṣi's ontological schema of agricultural life with the temporal demands of nineteenth century agrarian capitalism, Al-Khaili was able to ground the novel practice of khiyār sales in a discursive universe of natural time and being, leaving ample room for the robust extraction and circulation of rents around the burgeoning world of Omani commerce. If the khiyār sale had already become a fait accompli in Omani Indian Ocean commerce, Al-Khalili's work gave the documentary practice the philosophical and ontological underpinning necessary for it to enjoy widespread recognition as a legitimate contract, while keeping it grounded in a framework of rights and obligations.

Assembling the Khiyār

The emphasis here on the intellectual work necessary to give the khiyār shape should not, however, mislead us into associating the khiyār sale with Al-Khalili and his fatwas. Al-Khalili's voice may dominate the khiyār discourse, with its elaborate temporal and agricultural ontologies and the rights and obligations therein, but he certainly did not conjure up the khiyār, nor did he lay the groundwork for its spread around the region. That work fell to the merchants, planters, and scribes, who, together with Al-Khalili, managed to transmute the khiyār from a set of utterances in different plantations around South Arabia and East Africa to a collective decision: a contractual form that economic actors everywhere could mobilize, but also continually reshape. Assembling the khiyār sale, then, required coordinated action between those who theorized law, those who inscribed it into documents, and those who experienced it on a daily basis.

A central component of the world of commerce that the khiyār sale facilitated was the deed itself, called the waraqa. If the waraqa did not operate within a bureaucracy in the more formal organizational sense of the term, it certainly did conjure up something that resembled it, because around the waraqa coalesced a variety of different actors, all of whom contributed to shaping its form and content. Their work in creating the khiyār sale, and their mobilization of the graphic artifact of the waraqa itself, helped forge the philosophical, commercial, and bureaucratic world that the waraqa inhabited.

The waraqa, however, attributes authorship to one singular actor: the kātib, or scribe, whose name appears at its bottom. The kātib's role was an ambiguous one: he was more than a scribe, but perhaps less than a notary. Like notaries in early-modern Europe or Latin America, kātibs were expected to have a familiarity with the menu of nominate contracts and the formulas necessary to give them legal effect.Footnote ⁴⁵ Unlike notaries, however, kātibs were not expected to guarantee the authenticity of a previously written contract (although they were sometimes called upon to do so) nor were they expected to preserve copies of contracts that they drafted. They were tasked with bridging between the contracting parties and the law, not with furnishing the information necessary to enforce the law.

As intermediaries literate in the law, kātibs were crucial to the smooth functioning of commerce in the Indian Ocean, and vital actors in a dynamic juridical arena. The process of creating a legally valid written instrument hinged upon the kātib's ability to mediate between the transaction and the law, or the actual commercial landscape and imagined realm of commercial contracting in Islamic jurisprudence. He actively translated between the two, forging the links necessary to give an oral agreement the force of writing, and a written document the force of law, by infusing it with pivotal legal elements.

Historians, then, seem to have good reason to piece together the backgrounds of kātibs. Unfortunately, the records that Indian Ocean merchants left behind limit what we can say about kātibs. Unlike notaries in other parts of the world, kātibs attracted very little commentary from their contemporaries: there are no works of fiction featuring a kātib, nor are there any travelers’ accounts that mention them in any light, positive or negative. Even the most detailed waraqas only very briefly identify their authors through the formulaic conclusion “and this was written by … by his own hand” (wa katabahu… bi-yadih). Other records greatly circumscribe what the historian can say about these important actors. They were, as one historian observes, frustratingly “absent writers”; absent in every sense.Footnote ⁴⁶

Perhaps, however, the kātib's absence in the waraqa is appropriate. The kātib may have penned the waraqa and may have done much of the work in mediating between the worlds of commerce and law, but, like Al-Khalili, he could not claim sole authorship, either of the waraqa itself or of the khiyār sale contract. To transmute something such as the khiyār sale (and, by extension, its written articulation, the waraqa) from a set of utterances and isolated practices to a collective decision required more than one actor. It required coordinated action: a carefully constructed exchange between merchant, kātib, and jurist, and a complex interplay between waraqa and fatwa.

This multiparty exchange, and frustrations it could sometimes produce, reveals itself clearly in Al-Khalili's writing. In one fatwa, the jurist acknowledged the sometimes problematic role that the kātib had in the process of drafting a khiyār sales agreement. Replying to a query as to whether the kātib was punishable for drafting a waraqa that assigned a creditor a plantation's yield rather than the plantation itself (the latter forming a necessary component of the sale's validity) Al-Khalili contended that although the kātib shouldered no liability for something a financier (rabb al-māl) asked him to do, financiers should not ask kātibs to engage in that sort of deception.Footnote ⁴⁷ Decrying the abuse of the khiyār during his times, a late-nineteenth century jurist, Nur Al-Din Al-Salimi, asked Oman's kātibs to join him in breaking their pens in the face of requests to engage in this sort of chicanery, if they had any respect for the integrity of their religion at all.Footnote ⁴⁸

Read one way, the jurists’ writing might suggest that by the time word of the experiments reached the jurist they were already a fait accompli. None of the questioners were asking the jurists for permission to engage in the khiyār; they simply wanted clarification as to what their rights and liabilities were for transactions that had already taken place. Some questioners went as far as to ask the jurists to furnish them with competing opinions, signaling that they were less interested in the opinions themselves than they were in finding a legal carapace for their contractual maneuverings, and the art of crafting a fatwa question would have been an instrumental part of the process. Because the jurist could only answer according to what he was asked—there was no room for him to ask for factual clarification—his field of response was largely determined by the formulation of the question. Through a cleverly crafted question, a merchant would be able to elicit from the jurist a favorable response to his actions: a moral and legal justification for his contractual experimentation. And in responding to the carefully crafted questions posed by his correspondents, the jurist furnished a supple legal framework within which they could place their transactions, allowing them to place their contractual experimentations within a known universe of contractual forms, rights, and liabilities, and, as I discussed earlier, grounding a changing world of commercial practice in a moral economy.

Even after the jurist commented on it, the khiyār form continued to circulate between him and the kātib/merchant/planter pairings that characterized on-the-ground contracting, precipitating a multiparty interaction through which authorship of the new contract was distributed over a broad network of agents.Footnote ⁴⁹ The khiyār thus signaled the interdependency of economic and juridical actors in shaping the realm of commercial contracting, that this, it was a process that required these actors to work together in a carefully sequenced process of experiment, question, and answer. Creating contractual forms that addressed the needs of modern capitalism required a condominium of merchants, planters, kātibs, and jurists: agents who occupied either the field or the textbook, but could reach out across the divide.

Waraqas, Grammar, and the Construction of an Indian Ocean Arena

If the khiyār sale waraqa itself was the product of a complex interaction between different commercial and juridical actors, it was also no less of an agent in its own right. If the Indian Ocean arena was the product of commerce and migration, then historians must give the paper technologies that facilitated coordination their due attention. Although the waraqa itself could not act, as a mobile artifact it was able to coordinate actions among jurists, scribes, merchants, and planters, and bridge distant shores together under a common grammar.Footnote ⁵⁰ In a world in which people transacted in land, dates, cloves, ivory, slaves, and countless other commodities and rights in commercial centers separated by mountains, valleys, jungles, and an entire ocean, the waraqa formed the common denominator and supplied a unified grammar, and in its movement between the shores of Oman and East Africa and its passing among the hands of different Arab and Indian merchants, the material artifact of the waraqa facilitated convergence around a set of standards, forms, and practices. The waraqa provided a space in which actors between the two coasts could employ the same measures for date and clove trees, mobilize identical contractual forms to facilitate the extraction and circulation of rent and value, and contract within a common ontology of agricultural life, be it in Muscat or Mombasa.

As brief as it was, the question posed to Al-Khalili recounted at the beginning of this article spoke volumes on the world that the waraqa and its multiple authors created. In describing the Mazru‘i land sales Oman through different waraqas as taking place “with confidence that they know [bi-ḥukm al-iṭma'ināna annahum ‘alamū],” the questioner pointed to the framework necessary for a regional property market to emerge: one based on iṭma'ināna, or confidence. Even though the kātibs who penned the waraqas in question were unknown locally (majhūlūn), the correspondent noted, the transactions went on without incident or comment. Al-Khalili's equally short reply only confirmed the validity of the Mazru‘i's transactions: in cases such as this, he noted, people were able to expand the regime of iṭma'ināna (al-tawassu‘ bi-aḥkām al-iṭma'ināna), to the extent that it did not conflict with doubt (tu‘āriḍ fīh al-istirāba).”Footnote ⁵¹

But what might iṭma'ināna have meant in a world in which people transacted in property, harvest, and credit, from the interior of Oman to the East African coast and beyond? I wish to suggest that iṭma'ināna might be best understood here as a confidence in the stability of forms, standards, and practices between Oman and East Africa. More broadly, it suggests a confidence that the structures and grammars of the Omani and East African worlds of commercial contracting would be mutually legible. As waraqas circulated between the coasts and hinterlands of Oman and East Africa, so too did the standards, measures, and forms they contained: grammars of economic life that formed the sinews of a shared commercial arena and allowed the plantation economies of Oman and East Africa to become comparable units. In a sense, they achieved the incredible feat of transporting one site into another (which came first is of relatively little importance) without deformation or dislocation,Footnote ⁵² articulating a regional grammar that allowed for transoceanic commensurability, and animating the emergence of modern agrarian capitalism in the region.

Among the main standards that the waraqa circulated between Oman and East Africa was the frasila, a regional measure of weight that equaled roughly almost 16 kg, used to describe a wide variety of goods, from dates and cloves to ivory and frankincense—even meat.Footnote ⁵³ Other measures, such as the qora, also appear in waraqas from time to time, but these seem to be far less widespread than the frasila, which one encountered throughout the coasts and hinterlands of South Arabia and East Africa, including Hadramaut (where it is still used).Footnote ⁵⁴ The stability of forms that the frasila provided around the coasts formed a critical dimension of the shared lexicon of commerce in the region. The fact that one does not encounter the frasila in non-Omani plantation societies—for example, in Basra or Hasa—is equally significant.

Moving alongside measures such as the frasila were the similar agricultural ontologies that allowed for the extraction and circulation of rent between the two regions. The distinctions that Al-Khalili and Al-Shaqṣi (and after them, Al-Salimi) drew between the land, tree, and yield may have been articulated in an Omani milieu, but they were just as applicable to the East African context. The circulation of the khiyār form brought with it distinctions grounded in a more universalist natural law, and adapted them to a local setting and subject matter. Depending upon where one traded in the Western Indian Ocean, a frasila may have been used to measure a quantity of cloves, dates, or orchilla. However, no matter where one stood, when an object formed a separate subject of a commercial contract remained constant.

On the space of the waraqa itself, the complex juristic distinctions among land, tree, and yield, and all of the rules surrounding when something formed an independent object of sale, were compressed into the pithy statement that the plot was sold “with its boundaries, rights, land, and trees, [including] whatever it might contain” (bi-ḥudūdihā wa-ḥuqūqihā wa-arḍihā wa-ashjārihā kāyinan mā kān). This shorthand, appearing on waraqas throughout South Arabia and East Africa, captured the khiyār buyer's (i.e., the creditor's) contractual rights, signaling a legally valid purchase of land, while suggesting an intention to collect its yield. As waraqas were conjured up by kātibs around the Indian Ocean, or as they moved from planter to merchant, the practices that surrounded them enacted those very rights to land and yield, grounding them in a robust commercial reality.

Through the compression of these rights and distinctions onto the space of the waraqa, merchants opened the door to the world of negotiability. A creditor in need of cash, or who had outstanding obligations of his own could, in lieu of cash or physical property, transfer his waraqa and the rights that it entailed, simply by signing over the document. The waraqa thus became an asset in itself: one that actors could circulate among themselves with little hassle. In this regard, they functioned in a manner similar to bills of exchange, with one important exception: unless the original debtor managed to find someone to stand as surety for him, his obligations remained fixed.Footnote ⁵⁵ As a waraqa moved from one creditor to another, so too did the original debtor's obligations; whatever payments he had initially agreed to make would be to his new creditor.Footnote ⁵⁶Waraqa negotiability meant that real estate—a quintessentially immovable asset—and the rents that accompanied it were endowed with the fluidity necessary for them to travel through the dynamic and increasingly mobile credit networks that spanned the Indian Ocean.

As new markets emerged in East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, and as credit chains extended further into the interior from the coastline, the waraqa's negotiability allowed creditors to transfer outstanding debts and secure obligations between one another in a fluid manner, facilitating the extension of credit chains farther and deeper into new and distant markets. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, East African creditors frequently used waraqas in settling claims against one another.Footnote ⁵⁷ Merchants even hypothecated waraqas to their creditors as collateral against loans.Footnote ⁵⁸ The waraqa thus evolved into more than a transferable obligation; in its negotiability, it took on many of the characteristics associated with cash.

More broadly, in keeping standards alive and creating mutual legibility between the plantation economies of Oman and East Africa, the waraqa reinforced the position of those responsible for its production and circulation. Its usage called forth the juridical assemblage that brought it into being, constantly reinscribing the primacy of a juridical field composed of merchants, planters, kātibs, and jurists to the smooth functioning of commerce. Even those who were not able to read the waraqas would have entertained conceptions about them: the material qualities of the waraqa that were to count as signs, what sorts of agents were involved in them, how they were (and ought to be) produced and used, and how they fit into a universe of commercial and legal instruments.Footnote ⁵⁹ This more general understanding of “law” would have facilitated coordination between Arab and Indian merchants irrespective of whether one of the counterparties would have imagined themselves as falling under the ambit of Muslim jurisprudence. In the late 1860s, amid the violent upheavals in Muscat that ultimately resulted in Al-Khalili's execution, Indian merchants complained to British imperial officials that the authorities displayed lack of commitment to “the enforcement of the Muhammadan law of creditor and debtor”: a notion that itself suggested that they saw their transactions as fitting within a Muslim contractual framework even though they were neither Muslims nor subjects of the Sultan of Muscat.Footnote ⁶⁰ Therefore, if the quasi-bureaucracy described in the previous section manufactured the waraqa, its production and circulation between different merchants in an Indian Ocean arena reinforced that very bureaucracy, day in and day out.

It should then come as no surprise that a Mazru‘i agent, a merchant or planter from any other Omani clan, or any other commercial actor, carrying waraqas penned by kātibs in East Africa, would be able to transact in the Omani interior “with confidence.” Doing business in Oman, he would have encountered a world that was immediately legible to him: common measures for the goods he was transacting in, a common understanding of what land rights he was trading in, and a familiar group of actors drawing up the paperwork in a form that he would have instantly recognized as bearing all the of necessary marks of legitimacy. His ability to instantly comprehend the legal grammars of economic life around him, coupled with the ability of those around him to place his transactions within a known universe of contracting, formed critical dimensions of the confidence he—and tens of thousands of others like him—would have felt in doing business, and constituted fundamental elements of the commercio-legal stability of the world around him.