Arabs and Africans: Commerce and kinship from Oman to the East African interior, c. 1820--1900

The business and family networks that linked pre-colonial eastern and central Africa to the Swahili coast, the Indian Ocean islands of Zanzibar, and southeastern Arabia are vital to understanding the social and economic history of the region in the nineteenth century. Omani Arabs and their coastal and African allies forged alliances and founded settlements far into the interior of east Africa, beyond the reach of the Zanzibar state. Capital raised in Zanzibar through mortgages and loans enabled Arab, Swahili, and African (free and slave) mobility over a large area, but market dynamics alone did not determine the flows of capital, people, and goods. The logics of kinship and identity motivated long distance trade and settlement. The complement to this mobility, however, was stability, and profits allowed Arab and coastal men to establish themselves in the interior, at the coast, or in Oman. Women were the linchpins of kinship, cornerstones of settlements, and business people in their own right. The dissertation draws on more than eighteen months of archival and oral research in Zanzibar, mainland Tanzania, Burundi, and Oman.