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