Drawing on a far-flung, multilingual archive of contracts and financial instruments from around the western Indian Ocean, this article highlights how cross-cultural trade depended on the ability of groups to translate between one system and another, rendering one commercial lexicon legible to another so as to produce commensurability and allow for conversions to take place. Law constituted a foundational building block of this process: Indian Ocean merchants drew on a deep well of legal concepts and forms as they attempted to make their worlds legible to one another, mobilizing the grammars of law to bridge commercial systems. We situate these dynamics within the context of the Indian Ocean ‘bazaar’, establishing it as a site for thinking about the place of cross-cultural trade in world history, and the histories of global capitalism more broadly. We suggest that Euro-American capitalism’s very agents had to adapt their commerce to the idioms, logics, and contracts of their business partners around the Indian Ocean – a vernacular world of the bazaar that was itself already in motion.

Using a micro-historical method, this article reconceptualizes the family firm as a trans-local extended household. The family firm plays a central role in the historiography of long-distance trade in the Indian Ocean. Yet it remains a largely under-theorized concept. The conceptual shift that this article proposes enables the significant analytical incorporation of a broader cast of historical actors, including marital and "networked" kin. From this expanded viewpoint, the family firm emerges as a node in overlapping networks of capital—financial, social, and symbolic—and as a site of intersecting intimate and economic transactions. The article also explores the historical transformations—economic, legal, and social—that reverberated across the western Indian Ocean in the late nineteenth century. Eschewing a static institutional model, it argues that any analysis of the family firm must attend to the dynamic and complex shifts in household relationships that were wrought by such transformations.

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The finances underpinning the traffic in enslaved people across and around the Indian Ocean is one of the least understood factors of the trade. Comprehension of this complex history requires a consideration of all stages of the slave trade: enslavement mechanisms, the traffic and transportation of captives, and the uses of enslaved labor and capital. It also requires a broad definition of finance. Circulations of capital and credit underpinned the traffic in enslaved people, as much as the trades in Indian Ocean commodities that accompanied human trafficking. The role and business organization of merchant networks is a crucial part of this history. Muslim merchants could draw on a common faith and kinship to organize their commercial relationships, but they also relied on extensive networks of Islamic law. Gujarati merchants pooled capital and labor within extended kinship networks but disputed financial transactions in imperial courts. Both networks, however, depended on their African partners and agents to supply captives and established those relationships through gift-exchange, debt, or manumission. Thus, financial mechanisms, such as debt and pawnship, that were internal to slave-supplying societies were central to enslavement. On the other end of the trade, slave-owners in various Indian Ocean societies mobilized their slaves as security for loans, as credit that could be used to finance trading expeditions that produced more captives or to underwrite agricultural production on slave plantations. Yet credit networks also facilitated the social mobility of enslaved individuals in the Indian Ocean world (IOW), enabling some individuals to participate in commercial life and purchase property and sometimes even their own freedom. Europeans entering the IOW initially participated in and drew upon these existing financial structures of enslavement, trafficking, and slavery. Yet plantation agriculture and artisanal industries that European, Asian, and African societies developed during the long 19th century both intensified Indian Ocean slave trades and demanded new forms of capital investment. In this context, some European capital came from the Atlantic trade. British anti-slavery activities ultimately put an end to the legal traffic of captives across the Indian Ocean, though illegal trades, new forms of bondage, and internal slaveries continued into the 20th century. British interventions disrupted Indian Ocean financial networks more broadly, resulting in new forms of indebtedness in East Africa.