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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 and prohibition against their use of slave labour, as British Indian subjects, meant that this avenue for investment was blocked except in the form of merchant and moneylending capital to extract much of the surplus that remained in that sector. In the process they undermined the landowning class economically.

In the interior merchant capital induced expansion of commodity production, diverting labour from subsistence production to hunting for ivory and slaves. The result was the undermining of the existing precapitalist modes of production. In his discussion of merchant capital, Marx showed that commerce – which has existed in all modes of production other than the purely subsistence-oriented natural economy – is not confined to exchange of actual surplus, but bites deeper and deeper into subsistence production, converting entire sectors of production into producers of commodities, making not only luxuries but even subsistence increasingly dependent on sale. Commerce therefore has an erosive influence on the producing organisation. By subordinating production increasingly to production for exchange, it begins to transform the economic basis of the social formation originally founded primarily on production of use values, and sooner or later it disrupts the social organisation of production itself. It progressively dissolves the old egalitarian or feudal relationships, and expands the sphere of monetary relationships. It permits the emergence of a merchant class which begins to exert its apparently independent influence on the political economy of the social formation. Despite the fact that this class depends on the existing dominant classes which organise production, it undermines their economic as well as political position by constantly pushing for production for exchange and appropriating an increasing share of the surplus product. Although merchant capital undermines the existing mode of production, it is ‘incapable by itself of promoting and explaining the transition from one mode of production to another.’⁴

In the case of Unyamwezi in what is now western mainland Tanzania, merchant capital contributed not only to the depopulation of elephants as they were killed for their ivory, but also of its people as the Nyamwezi turned to a life of trading to as far away as eastern Zaire, and to porterage to transport ivory and imported manufactured goods between the coast and the interior. In a sense it may have begun the process of dissolving the old mode and preparing it to be remoulded by colonialism as an underdeveloped area. It is not, therefore, commerce that revolutionises production but, rather, production that revolutionises commerce. Far from promoting the transition, merchant capital – which is dependent as preconditions of its own prosperity on the old classes that organise production, and on the old system of production – may play a reactionary role in preserving or buttressing the old classes and production system against change even while draining them of their vitality. It cannot by itself contribute to the overthrow of the old mode. Accordingly, Marx formulated the law that ‘the independent development of merchants’ capital . . . stands in inverse proportion to the general economic development of society.’⁵ What new mode will replace the old one, therefore, does not depend on commerce but on the character of the old mode and, with the rise of the capitalist mode as a world system, increasingly on the impact of this vibrant mode from abroad.

The Zanzibar commercial empire that developed during the nineteenth century and encompassed much of eastern Africa was like its European predecessors in that it did not evolve elaborate administrative and political structures. Fiscal administration was provided by the custom master who farmed the customs for five-yearly periods. The Sultan had a number of governors at the major ports on the mainland, but his flag did not follow trade into the interior. The empire was largely sustained by the Sultan’s monopoly over the coastal termini of trade routes from the interior, and a system of common economic interests with the emergent merchant classes and chiefs in the interior to keep trade flowing. Such an informal system suffered from competition and contradiction between the merchant classes from the coast and the interior, leading to several wars. At the coast the state itself was subverted by its indebtedness to the most powerful group of Indian financiers and by the conversion of the Indian mercantile class into an instrument of British influence. But from the end of the eighteenth century the compradorial⁶ state had also been politically dependent on Britain to protect itself from its rivals, particularly in the Persian Gulf, and to gain access to the British Indian market. By the middle of the nineteenth century it could no longer safeguard the political integrity of the Omani kingdom and prevent its partition between its Omani and African sections. This was a prelude to the partition of even the African section during the Scramble for Africa, and eventually to the subjugation of Zanzibar itself to colonial rule.

Previous historians of the East African coast tended to approach the subject of economic expansion during the nineteenth century with the empiricist tools of political history, ascribing to Seyyid Said, who presided over the commercial empire, all sorts of initiatives, and taking little account of the nature of the Omani ‘monarchy’. They rationalised all economic changes then occurring in East Africa in terms of the economic policies of the most prominent political figure. Sir Reginald Coupland attributed to Said, among other things, the exploitation of Zanzibar for cloves, the expansion of the hinterland, the development of the Indian community to finance economic expansion, and the encouragement given to foreign merchants to trade at Zanzibar. Kenneth Ingham went so far as to assert that the history of East Africa was moulded by the personality of Said, arguing that the transformation of Zanzibar from a small and relatively unimportant village to the most important trading centre along the coast was ‘almost entirely due to the initiative and powers of organisation of Seyyid Said.’⁷

As will be shown in the following analysis, many of the developments with which Said is credited were set in motion long before he first set foot in East Africa in 1827–8, although as a merchant prince, when he jumped onto the bandwagon, he gave that wagon a powerful push. But the argument against the Coupland–Ingham thesis is not merely empirical but also philosophical. As Marx shows, the theory that history is moulded by some ‘great men’ is but a variation of the idealist conception of history which began to develop with the division of labour at its highest stage, the division between mental and manual labour. Henceforth men’s ideas appeared to emancipate themselves from their earthly roots, and to rise to the rarefied atmosphere of philosophical idealism, only to return to earth head first to impose a pattern, an order, on material conditions, and to attempt to explain historical phenomena with the help of their idealistic derivatives.⁸

Plate 2 Seyyid Said bin Sultan, Ruler of Oman and Zánzibar, 1804–56

In practice, as Marx shows, the attempt to prove the hegemony of the spirit in history involves, first, an effort to separate the ideas of those ruling from these actual rulers and thus to recognise the rule of ideas in history. Secondly, it involves bringing an order into this rule of ideas and proving a mystical connection between successive ruling ideas, thus providing the world of ideas with its own independent laws of development. Finally, in order to remove the mystical appearance, it involves personifying the various stages of development of the idea in certain philosophers and ‘great men’ who are seen as makers or manufacturers of history. But as Georg Büchner aptly put it, ‘the individual personality is only foam on the crest of the wave’.⁹ He may betray the turbulence in the bowels of history but he is not its explanation. The explanation lies in the economic infrastructure of relations of production and exchange and the appropriation of the surplus product. On this foundation arises a legal and political superstructure to which correspond definite forms of social organisation,¹⁰ such as the Busaidi state at Zanzibar.

Notes

1. See Marx, Vol. 3, ch. 20; Mukherjee, ch. 3.

2. Marx, Vol. 3, ch. 20.

3. The Mascarenes refer to the small islands to the east of Madagascar. Under the French they were known as He de France and Bourbon. The former was renamed Mauritius after its capture by Britain in 1810; the latter was renamed Réunion.

4. Marx, Vol. 3, p. 328.

5. ibid., pp. 327-8.

6. Comprador is a Portuguese term for ‘purchaser’. In the East it referred to brokers or commission agents, and in China to substantial agencies which carried out commercial activities on behalf of foreign traders and supplied their needs, and even workers to the trading factories. In Chinese Marxist literature the term referred to local agents of foreign capital or interests. See Yule and Burnell, pp. 243–4.

7. Coupland (1939), pp. 4–5; Ingham, pp. 19, 73, 80.

8. Marx and Engels, Vol. 1, p. 33.

9. ibid., Vol. 1, p. 50; Büchner quoted in Plekhanov, Vol. 1, pp. 608.

10. Marx and Engels, Vol. 1, p. 503.