Abstract
Abstract This article explores the contours of debt and labor in the early twentieth-century Persian Gulf pearl dive. It examines the barwa, a declaration exchanged by nakhodas (dhow captains) about the amounts that divers owed and the terms by which they might be hired out. By looking both through and at the barwa, we find a window into the Indian Ocean maritime bazaar, and into the artifacts through which mobile and itinerant laborers were bound to the dhow and its captain. Maritime actors used these papers to navigate the boundary between person and property, and between free and unfree, all within a changing commercial and legal world.
Highlights
On the morning of March 21, 1928, an African by the name of Said binAli walked into a government office on the Persian Gulf island of Bahrain and presented Charles Belgrave, the recently-appointed British Adviser, with a written petition
By looking both through and at the barwa, we find a window into the Indian Ocean maritime bazaar, and into the artifacts through which mobile and itinerant laborers were bound to the dhow and its captain
Bishara nakhodas1 [dhow captains] agreed to employ [him].”. He proceeded to ask Belgrave to give him a barwa—a certificate attesting to his ability to take on loans—“so that [he] could work with one of the nakhodas, for if there was not one in [his] hands they would not accept [him].”2 Said’s case was common: around the Persian Gulf, there were hundreds like him over the course of the 1920s-enslaved people who approached the British Political Agency asking for both a manumission certificate and a barwa that would allow them to participate in the summer pearl dive.[3]
Summary
On the morning of March 21, 1928, an African by the name of Said binAli walked into a government office on the Persian Gulf island of Bahrain and presented Charles Belgrave, the recently-appointed British Adviser, with a written petition. Both are bonds that link together past, present, and future, debt presupposes a more finite temporal horizon than credit does; it assumes repayment somewhere down the line, which credit does not necessarily imply, even as it demands “the promise of a future transfer of disposal of utilities, whatever they may be.”[24] And in the context of the nineteenth-century boom and the emergence of a market of seasonal laborers, credit was a way for merchants and nakhodas to channel resources towards securing the labor the firm needed to capture the new opportunities the pearling boom offered.[25] We might see the credit regime of the pearl dive as reflecting a form of building wealth in people that animated the maritime economy of the Persian Gulf This concept of wealth in people, which emerged out of the literature on African history, describes a phenomenon by which wealth was understood as resting in communities of people that actors would form: in the specialized knowledge that they would bring to the collective, and in the ability of the community to reproduce its social capital over the course of generations. We have to step off the dhow and into the bazaar
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