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The Sailing Scribes: Circulating Law in the Twentieth-Century Indian Ocean
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 August 2022
Abstract
What did the practice of law look like on the high seas? This has been a matter of some discussion among legal historians, with the bulk of the evidence coming from encounters between European ships in the Atlantic and Asia. This article takes a different tack, taking as its starting point a series of contracts copied into the logbook of the early-twentieth century Arab dhow captain (nakhoda) ‘Abdulmajeed Al-Failakawi. Although some of these appear to have been contracts that the nakhoda entered into or witnessed, most were contractual templates that presented formulas for a variety of written obligations between members of the Indian Ocean maritime community. In reading these formulas alongside contracts left behind by Al-Failakawi and other Indian Ocean nakhodas, I reflect on how law circulated by members of an itinerant society of mariners that sought to forge the contours of a commercial world on their ships and across the waters, and weave it through an imperial seascape. I explore how workaday forms of law and legal epistemologies circulated around the maritime marketplaces of the Indian Ocean world, at the margins of a colonial and imperial political economy, through actors who read across different genres of literature, and who moved between the multiple roles of captain, navigator, supercargo, and scribe.
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References
1 Some sections of the poetry include popular verses from the famous collection Nafḥat Al-Yaman (“The Breeze of Yemen”) whereas others appear to be a hodgepodge of different poems, some of which appeared in popular music at the time. I am grateful to Gabriel Lavin for his help in identifying some of the poetry.
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20 One such individual was Mohammed Salem Al-Sudairawi, a Bombay-based Arab, hailing from Kuwait, who carried on a regular correspondence with hundreds of merchants around the Western Indian Ocean. Although he was ostensibly in Bombay as the agent to the ruler of Kuwait, Shaikh Mubarak, the bulk of Al-Sudairawi's work involved transferring money between banks in India, the Gulf, and South Arabia, and debiting them from (or crediting them to) the accounts that he kept with the recipients. After making purchases, his correspondents would write to him and ask him to make payments on their behalf to their sellers’ accounts or to other local accounts. Political Agent, Kuwait, to Director of Persian Gulf Telegraphs, Karachi (1 July 1909) IOR R/15/5/87: 60.
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29 Zanzibar National Archives, AA 7/2 and 7/3. On debt instruments in the Indian Ocean, see Thomas F. McDow, Buying Time: Debt and Mobility in the Western Indian Ocean (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019); and Fahad Ahmad Bishara, A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780–1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
30 Bishara, “No Country But the Ocean,” 358–62.
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33 See also “Certified Copies of Deeds and Documents from 1 January 1927 to 1932,” IOR R/15/5/89.
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36 One 1906 map of the pearl banks that lay roughly between Kuwait and Bahrain was produced “with the assistance of the nakhoda Saleh of the Kuwait pearlers.” IOR R/15/5/91: 12.
37 The Bahrain Political Agent's Court records form the best archive for thinking through law in the Persian Gulf, but have not yet received any scholarly attention. Bishara, “A Sea of Debt,” 461–3.