Departmental Events

November 1, 2023

Bruce Hall, Department of History, “Finding Islamic Law in trans-Saharan Trade: towards an unlikely history of capitalism in nineteenth-century Timbuktu”

Abstract: It is almost a cliché to connect the development of trans-Saharan trade with the spread of Islam.
Muslim commercial culture, literacy and law did spread into and across the Sahara over time and
there is plenty of textual and archeological evidence of intensified commercial exchange in
certain places and times. But what we do not have is very much evidence for the role played by
literacy in Arabic and Islamic legal institutions in this trade. We might make a logical
supposition that the spread of Islamic institutions led to improved commercial efficiency over
time, but such a claim is not very well supported with evidence. In this paper, I seek to revise
accepted frameworks for the working of trans-Saharan trade on the basis of an extensive corpus
of commercial letters exchanged along an axis connecting the Niger River Valley, in what is
today Mali, with the Mediterranean coast at Tripoli, in what is today Libya. The paper argues
that a boom in demand for ostrich feathers in the second half of the 19th century in Europe and
North America had a significant impact on the institutions employed in the Sahara used to
facilitate credit and debt arrangements necessary for trade. As more and more commercial capital
flowed across the Sahara, merchants began to deploy a series of institutional changes in how
partnerships were designed, ostensibly in the terms of classical `Islamic commercial law, and
distinct from commercial mechanisms used earlier and on shorter circuits of trade. This allows us
to historicize economic history in ‘pre-colonial’ Africa and better understand the history of
global capitalism in the nineteenth century.