Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar. Abdul Sheriff

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       Introduction

       The Commercial Empire

      Zanzibar developed during the nineteenth century as the seat of a vast commercial empire that in some ways resembled the mercantile empires of Europe of the preceding centuries. Unlike them, however, it was developing at a time when capitalism was already on its way to establishing its sway over industrial production and was subordinating merchant capital to its own needs. In the capitalist metropoles this entailed the disintegration of merchant capital’s monopoly position and the reduction of its rate of profit to the general average. It was thus being reduced to an agent of productive capital with a specific function: distributing goods produced by industry and supplying the latter with the necessary raw materials.¹

      But capitalism was simultaneously developing as a world system as it gradually drew the different corners of the globe into its fold. In this historic process merchant capital played a vanguard role. As a form of capital it shared the dynamism arising out of profit maximisation and the drive towards accumulation of the capitalist classes. This drive, therefore, pushed it to encourage constant expansion in the scale of production of exchange values without itself participating in actual production. Existing as it did at the periphery of the expanding capitalist system, it seemed to enjoy its pristine position and relative autonomy. Backward conditions here enabled it to monopolise trade and appropriate a handsome rate of profit that appeared to guarantee primacy to the merchant classes. That primacy, however, was illusory, for capitalism was close on their heels, subverting them step by step, and ultimately subordinating them to its own rule. In examining the history of Zanzibar during the nineteenth century, therefore, it is necessary to consider closely what Karl Marx termed the ‘historical facts about merchant capital’.²

      Zanzibar was essentially a commercial intermediary between the African interior and the capitalist industrialising West, and it acted as a conveyor belt transmitting the demands of the latter for African luxuries and raw materials, and supplying in exchange imported manufactured goods. Economic movements in East Africa from the eighteenth century onwards were primarily based on two major commodities and two fundamental transformations. Increased Omani participation in Indian Ocean trade, particularly after the overthrow of Portuguese hegemony over their coastline, had given impetus to the emergence of an Omani merchant class which began to invest part of its profit in the production of dates using slave labour. To this important but limited demand for African slaves was added during the last third of the eighteenth century a substantial French demand for slaves to be supplied to their sugar colonies in the Mascarenes³ and even to the Americas. But the period characterised by European mercantilism, of which the slave trade was an aspect, was rapidly drawing to a close. The strangulation of the European slave trade after the end of Anglo-French warfare in the Indian Ocean, however, provided an unexpected opportunity and a new lease of life to the slave mode of production in East Africa at the periphery of the world system dominated by capital. A vital transformation of the slave sector was therefore initiated during the first quarter of the nineteenth century as Arab slave traders began to divert slaves to the clove plantations of Zanzibar, and later to the grain plantations on the East African coast. Thus the sector was metamorphosed from being primarily one dominated by the export of slave labour to one that exploited that labour within East Africa to produce commodities to feed into the world system of trade.

      The second economic transformation was activated initially by the collapse of the supply of ivory from Mozambique to India towards the end of the eighteenth century as a result of the rapacious Portuguese system of taxation. However, the ivory trade became a vibrant force with the enormous expansion of demand by the affluent classes of the capitalist West. The supply of such a commodity of the hunt demanded a constant expansion of the hinterland. So rapid was the growth in demand that throughout the nineteenth century it almost always outstripped supply, and resulted in a constant increase in the price of ivory. The price of manufactured imports, on the other hand, remained steady or even declined as a result of technological improvements and the development of the productive forces. These divergent price curves constituted for East Africa a powerful and dynamic motive force for the phenomenal expansion of trade and of the hinterland as far as the eastern parts of present-day Zaire. The extremely favourable terms of trade were able to cover not only the increasing cost of porterage but also to permit an enormous accumulation of merchant profit at the coast.

      The trade of Zanzibar grew enormously during the first half of the nineteenth century as a result, but it owed its motive force primarily to the process of capitalist industrialisation and the consequent affluence of the well-to-do classes in the West. Through the export of ivory, cloves and other commodities, and the import of manufactured goods, it was therefore inevitable that the predominantly commercial economy of Zanzibar would be sucked into the whirlpool of the international capitalist system and be subordinated economically, and eventually politically, to the dominant capitalist power.

      As a mercantile state Zanzibar sought to monopolise the trade and appropriate the profit at the coast. An attempt was made to centralise the whole foreign trade of Africa from eastern Zaire to the Indian Ocean at the major entrepôt of Zanzibar; this included prohibitions on foreign merchants trading at the mainland termini of long-distance caravan routes from the African interior. This was particularly true of the Mrima coast opposite Zanzibar, which was reserved for local traders. On this system was constructed an elaborate fiscal structure that sought to squeeze a maximum amount of the surplus from the different stretches of the coast. The most heavily taxed area was of course the Mrima coast since it had little alternative except to use the entrepôt, while areas further to the north and south were induced to channel their trade through the commercial centre by lower rates of taxation. The system permitted the appropriation of part of the surplus by the Zanzibar state whose revenue rose more than sevenfold during the first seven decades of the nineteenth century.

      The commercial system was also extremely profitable for the merchant class which, taking advantage of the highly favourable terms of trade, accumulated an enormous amount of merchant capital. Commerce, in fact, was so profitable that there was little inducement to divert that surplus from circulation to production except initially. Until the 1830s clove production was rendered attractive by the high prices of cloves as a result of the Dutch monopoly over the commodity, and many Arab traders did invest their profit from the slave trade in landownership. But with overproduction the plantations became a trap for the Arabs; they had invested much of their capital in them and now had little hope of a favourable return. For the Indian section of the merchant class, the declining profitability of clove production СКАЧАТЬ