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‘The Dearest Thing on the East African Coast’: The Forgotten Nineteenth-Century Trade in ‘Muscat Cloth’

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Textile Trades, Consumer Cultures, and the Material Worlds of the Indian Ocean

Part of the book series: Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies ((IOWS))

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Abstract

This chapter aims to reconstruct the forgotten nineteenth-century western Indian Ocean trade in hand-woven textiles made in the southern Arabian nation of Oman. Combining a study of texts, images, objects and interviews with contemporary Omani weavers, it reveals the past importance of the export trade in Omani striped cotton and silk cloth. It further shows that the active demand in eastern Africa for specific varieties of handwoven cloth from both Oman and India was a driving force in the region’s commercial boom of the nineteenth century, with global consequences. Finally, this chapter brings to the fore luxury textiles and men’s dress, topics that have perhaps received inadequate attention in studies of nineteenth-century western Indian Ocean textile trades and dress.

I thank Julia Al Zadjali, Neil Richardson and the Public Authority for Craft Industries of Oman for their generous assistance with research in Oman. For their expert assistance in object research, I thank Silvia Dolz, Paola Ivanov, Sandra Feracutti, Floriane Morin, Karen Russell Kramer, Mathilde Leduc-Grimaldi, Aude Dobrakowski, Dwaune Latimer and their staffs. Research assistant Heather Bell undertook invaluable translations from German. Research was made possible by grants from the Pasold Fund, Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada, and the Department of World Cultures, Royal Ontario Museum. William Clarence Gervase-Smith, Pedro Machado and Michael Phillippo offered useful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter, but all final interpretations remain my own.

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Notes

  1. 1.

     ‘Marchandises d’importation propres au commerce de la côte de Zanguébar’ [ca. 1846–48] (Océan Indien 5/23 no. 7, Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer (ANOM), Aix-en-Provence). I thank Jeremy Prestholdt and Christopher Hayden for originally sharing the full document with me. Edouard Loarer accompanied Charles Guillain’s 1846–1848 expedition along the coasts of eastern Africa. As the representative of the French Ministère du Commerce and the Chambre de Commerce de Nantes, his central task was studying and reporting on cloth consumption habits. See Sarah Fee and Samuel F. Sanchez “Édouard Loarer, ‘Marchandises d’importation propres au commerce de la cote de Zanguébar’, and the French explorations of the East Coast of Africa, 1846–48” (in press).

  2. 2.

    Other terms to designate the cloth have included Maskat stuff, Muscat longee or lungy, Muscat apron, Arabian longee or lungee, kissua, Arab checks, Maskati, nankin de Mascate, étoffes de Mascate, soie de Mascate, Mascat zeug. The earliest use of the term I have found is ‘Muscat lungy’ included in a list of imports to southwest India. See Francis Buchanan, A Journey from Madras through the Countries of Mysore, Canara and Malabar, vol. 3 (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1807), p. 4.

  3. 3.

    Jeremy Prestholdt, Domesticating the World. African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Pedro Machado, Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c. 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

  4. 4.

    William Gervase Clarence-Smith, “The textile industry of eastern Africa in the longue durée,” in Africa’s Development in Historical Perspective, ed. Emmanuel Akyeampong, Robert Bates, Nathan Nunn, and James A. Robinson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 264–94; Pedro Machado, “Awash in a sea of cloth: Gujarat, Africa, and the Western Indian Ocean, 1300–1800,” in The Spinning World, ed. Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 161–179; Pedro Machado, “Cloths of a new fashion: Indian Ocean networks of exchange and cloth zones of contact in Africa and India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,” in How India Clothed the World, ed. Giorgio Riello and Thirnakar Roy (London: Brill, 2009); Jeremy Prestholdt, “As Artistry Permits and Custom May Ordain; The social fabric of material consumption in the Swahili world, circa 1450 to 1600” (Evanston: Northwestern University, PAS Working Paper, no. 3, 1998); Machado, Ocean of Trade; Prestholdt, Domesticating the World.

  5. 5.

    But see Zulfikar Hirji, “The kofia Tradition of Zanzibar: the Implicit and Explicit Discourses of Men’s Head-dress in an Indian Ocean Society,” in Textiles in Indian Ocean Societies, ed. Ruth Barnes (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 68–84.

  6. 6.

    Feringee Furaree, “Rough Notes on a Rough Ride from the East, Part III,” in The Dublin University Magazine, vol. 16 (1840), pp. 243–247; p. 243.

  7. 7.

    Robert Geran Landen, Oman since 1856: Disruptive Modernization in a Traditional Arab Society (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1967); Ahmed Hamoud Maamiry, Oman and East Africa, 2nd rev. ed. (New Delhi: Lancers Publishers, 1980).

  8. 8.

    M. Reda Bhacker, Trade and Empire in Muscat and Zanzibar: Roots of British Domination (London: Routledge, 1992).

  9. 9.

    Landen, Oman since 1856, p. 82.

  10. 10.

    Gigi Crocker Jones, Traditional Spinning and Weaving in the Sultanate of Oman (Muscat: Historical Association of Oman, 1987); Charlotte Heath, “Tradition and Innovation: Social Aspects of Learning Spinning and Weaving Skills in Oman,” Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture 11, no. 2 (2013), pp. 176–187; Neil Richardson and Marcia Dorr, The Craft Heritage of Oman, 2 vols. (Dubai: Motivate Publishing, 2003).

  11. 11.

    Richardson and Dorr, The Craft Heritage of Oman.

  12. 12.

    Bhacker asserts that, by 1830, Muttrah had surpassed Muscat as the primary producer. See Bhacker, Trade and Empire, p. 133.

  13. 13.

    James R. Wellsted, Travels in Arabia, vol. I (London: Murray, 1838), pp. 197, 320; James Buckingham, Travels in Assyria, 2nd ed. (London: Colburn, 1830), p. 412; S.B. Miles, The Countries and Tribes of the Persian Gulf, 2 vols, (London: Harrison and Sons, 1919); Philip Ward, Travels in Oman: On the Track of the Early Explorers (Cambridge: Oleander Press Ltd, 1987), pp. 125, 148, 227; Miles, The Countries and Tribes, vol. 2, p. 457; Louis H. Maguire, “Oman: Its commerce, Industries, and Resources,” Cotton Goods Trade of the World, and the Share of the United States therein, no. 12 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1881), pp. 459–474.

  14. 14.

    S.B. Miles in Ward, Travels in Oman, p. 279.

  15. 15.

    Richardson and Dorr, The Craft Heritage of Oman, vol. 2, p. 28.

  16. 16.

    Unlike Ethiopia and India, where weavers sit on the edge of the pit, Omani weavers stand in a deep pit about shoulder level and lean against the back wall.

  17. 17.

    Wellsted noted they were striped blue and red, measuring “about ten feet long and two feet six inches or three feet broad.” See Travels in Arabia, vol. 1, p. 320.

  18. 18.

    The Prophet is said to have forbidden men to wear silk; consequently, Oman’s rulers periodically forbade the fibre for dress. See Ward, Travels in Oman, p. 34.

  19. 19.

    James B. Fraser, Narrative of a Journey into Khorasan, in the Years 1821 and 1822 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1825), p. 18.

  20. 20.

    In the 1840s, Loarer noted there existed five types of Muscat cloth, but did not provide names or descriptions (‘Marchandises’, ANOM).

  21. 21.

    The Vice-Consul sent samples of these cloths to the Lille Commercial Museum but only one has survived. I have been unable to locate Muscat cloth samples sent by Burton to the Royal Geographic Society, or by Loarer and other French agents to various French ministries.

  22. 22.

    For a fascinating life history of one such weaver in the twentieth century, see Julia M. Stehlin-Alzadjali, The Traditional Women’s Dress of Oman (Muscat Press & Publishing House, 2010).

  23. 23.

    Wellsted, Travels to Arabia, vol. 1, p. 320; Miles 1876 in Ward, Travels in Oman, p. 371.

  24. 24.

    Bhacker, Trade and Empire, p. 135. The many important crafts of Nizwa included dyeing imported cottons with indigo.

  25. 25.

    Charles Guillain, “Côte de Zanguébar et Mascate. Extrait d’un rapport de M. le Lieutenant de vaisseau Guillain année 1841”, Revue Coloniale, vol. 1, pp. 520–571 (1843), p. 553.

  26. 26.

    200 to 250 maunds in the year 1841 (Guillain, “Côte de Zanguébar”, p. 553).

  27. 27.

    “Rapport commercial sur l’Oman et Mascate en 1900”, Correspondance Commerciale Mascate, Archives du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères (MAE), Paris.

  28. 28.

    Guillain, “Côte de Zanguébar”, p. 555. In 1910 Muscat imported ninety sacs of silk floss worth 40,000 Maria Theresa thalers (See “Rapport commercial sur l’Oman,” MAE). Oman also exported, or re-exported, dyes and silk floss dyed locally (See Buchanan, A Journey from Madras, vol. 3, p. 60; Guillain, “Côte de Zanguébar,” p. 555).

  29. 29.

    “Rapport commercial sur l’Oman”, MAE; Guillain, ‘Côte de Zanguébar’, p. 558.

  30. 30.

    Guillain, ‘Côte de Zanguébar’, p. 556; Maguire, ‘Oman: Its Commerce, Industries, and Resources’, p. 470; Buchanan, A Journey from Madras, vol. 3, p. 59. Into the year 2000, Omani dyers near Sur were dyeing magenta coloured silk (with chemical means) to achieve the desired hue (see Richardson and Dorr, Craft Heritage, vol. 2, p. 287).

  31. 31.

    In the cosmopolitan port towns of Oman, each of the many large non-Arab communities—Baluchis, Indian merchants, Ethiopians, Somalis, etc. – had unique dress styles.

  32. 32.

    Carsten Niebuhr, Travels through Arabia and other Countries in the East, 2 vols (London: R. Morison and Son, 1792), vol. 2, p. 233; Fraser, Narrative of a Journey into Khorasan, p. 26. Medieval sources, too, remarked on the use of wrappers by coastal Arabs. See Wendell Phillipps, Oman: A History (London: Longmans, 1967) pp. 16–17. To this day, wrapper dress is required of hajj pilgrims to Mecca.

  33. 33.

    Wellsted, Travels in Arabia, p. 346.

  34. 34.

    William Ruschenberger, A voyage round the world: including an embassy to Muscat and Siam in 1835, 1836, and 1837 (London: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1838), p. 28; Buckingham, Travels in Assyria, p. 109. Buckingham implied this held true for Bedouin men as well, Travels in Assyria, p. 415.

  35. 35.

    Fraser, Narrative of a Journey, pp. 20, 26; Buckingham, Travels in Assyria, p. 412. See also Edmund Roberts, Embassy to the Eastern Courts of Cochin-China, Siam, and Muscat in the US sloop of war Peacock during the years 1832–3–4 (New York: Harper Brothers, 1837), p. 354; C. de Gobineau, Trois Ans en Asie de 1855 a 1858 (Paris: Hachette, 1859), p. 95.

  36. 36.

    Ruschenberger, A voyage, p. 137. According to oral traditions, Al Saidi rulers from the 1780 s patronized locally woven turbans, commissioning the distinctive pattern that is still reserved for the sole use of the royal family (see Richardson and Dorr, Omani Craft Heritage, vol. 2, p. 284).

  37. 37.

    Wellsted, Travels to Arabia, vol. 1, p. 320.

  38. 38.

    Ruschenberger, A Voyage, p. 77; Maguire, ‘Oman: Its commerce’, pp. 462, 466; Henshaw 1840 in Ward, Travels in Oman, p. 17.

  39. 39.

    Bhacker, Trade and Empire, p. xxix.

  40. 40.

    French Vice-Consul to Muscat, “Note explicative pour la collection d’échantillons envoyée au Musée Commercial de Lille”, ca.1895, Registration Files, Musée d’Histoire Naturelle de Lille.

  41. 41.

    ‘Rapport commercial sur l’Oman’, MAE; Guillain cited in Richard Burton, Zanzibar: City, Island and Coast, 2 vols (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1872), vol. 1, p. 273.

  42. 42.

    Guillain, “Côte de Zanguébar”, p. 558; Charles Guillain, Documents sur l’Histoire, La Géographie et le Commerce de l’Afrique Orientale, 3 vols (Paris: Bertrand, 1856), vol. 2, p. 359; ‘Rapport commercial sur l’Oman’, MAE; Buckingham, Travels in Assyria, p. 109; Loarer, ‘Marchandises’, ANOM; Maguire, ‘Oman: Its Commerce, Industries, and Resources’, p. 472; ‘Commerce and Industries of Oman’, Commercial Relations of the U.S. with foreign countries during the year 1907 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1908), p. 618.

  43. 43.

    Prestholdt, “As Artistry Permits”.

  44. 44.

    Richardson and Dorr, Craft Heritage, vol. 2, p. 284. Omanis were importing cloth to Kilwa in the early 1700 s, but the cloth type and origins are not indicated. See Edward Alpers, Ivory and Slaves in East Central Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), p. 73. Bhacker writes that Muscat cloth was a major import before the 1820s but does not indicate his source, Trade and Empire, p. 119.

  45. 45.

    My translation of Morice, “Projet d’un établissement à la Côte Orientale d’Afrique”, MSS. Afr. r. 6, Bodleian Library, Oxford. An unsigned letter from 23 février 1778 confirms that “Arabs furnish them [people of Swahili coast] with cottons (toilles) and fabrics (etoffes) particular to the dress of the Moors; and for the wrappers of the blacks; they go and fetch these products on the Malabar coast, in Muscat or Moka” (Ocean Indien Carton 15 Dossier 61, ANOM).

  46. 46.

    Richard Burton (1860) The Lake Regions of Central Africa, 2 vols (London: Longman), vol. 1, p. 351.

  47. 47.

    Ibid.

  48. 48.

    For an analysis of all luxury textile imports in eastern Africa in the nineteenth century, see Sarah Fee “Cloth With Names: the luxury textile trade to eastern Africa, ca. 1800-1880,” Textile History 48, 1 (2017): pp. 49–84.

  49. 49.

    Fee, ‘Cloths with Names’. In 2011, I interviewed practising weavers in Sur, Quryat and Samand as Shan.

  50. 50.

    On Sohar as the main producer of blue and white checked turbans, see Buckingham, Travels in Assyria, p. 412; James Buckingham, ‘Voyage from Muscat to Bushire’, Oriental Herald and Journal of General Literature, vol. 19: pp. 39–57 (1828), p. 40; Wellsted Travels to Arabia, vol. 1, p. 103; Ward, Travels in Oman, p. 148. Sacleux interprets Burra as an Omani topynym, perhaps al Barka (Charles Sacleux, Dictionnaire Swahili-Français (Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie, 1939)).

  51. 51.

    Henry Morgan Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, 2 vols (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1878), vol. 2, p. 509.

  52. 52.

    While not recognizing the name sederbaz, Omani weavers do make to this day a particular striping pattern called chador for the Sur market, characterized by large magenta and black checks. For an historical image of a Sakalava woman wearing the barawaji, see Sarah Fee, ‘Anthropology and Materiality.’ In Sandy Black et al. eds. The Handbook of Fashion Studies, London: Berg (2013), pp. 301–324.

  53. 53.

    “Principales industries Zanzibar en 1864,” Correspondance Commerciale Zanzibar, vol. 2, 1852–1865, MAE. Loarer noted it measured from 285 to 305cm in length, and 122 to 130 in width.

  54. 54.

    Prassanan Parthasarathi, “De-industrialization in nineteenth-century South India,” in How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500–1850, eds. Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy, pp. 415–435 (London: Brill, 2009), p. 423.

  55. 55.

    Loarer, ‘Marchandises’, ANOM.

  56. 56.

    Loarer, ‘Marchandises’, ANOM; Lewis Pelly, ‘Remarks on the Tribes and Resources around the Shoreline of the Persian Gulf’, Transactions of the Bombay Geographical Society, 16 (1863–64) pp. 32–103.

  57. 57.

    Loarer, ‘Marchandises’, ANOM. By 1895, anilines and synthetic dyes, notably a German-made green, were used for silk (see ‘Note explicative’, Musée d’Histoire Naturelle de Lille). But even before the invention of synthetic dyes, eastern Africans in some cases preferred European over Kachchhi dyes. See Burton, Lakes, vol. 2, p. 531.

  58. 58.

    Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, vol. 2, p. 509.

  59. 59.

    Burton, Lakes, vol. 2, p. 532.

  60. 60.

    Based on designations of ‘fine’ or ‘ulyah’. See Burton, Lakes, p. 533; Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, vol. 2, p. 509.

  61. 61.

    C. P. Rigby, ‘Muscat-Zanzibar’, Commercial Reports received at the Foreign Office from her Majesty’s Consuls between July 1 1862 and June 30 1863 (London: Harrison and Sons, 1863), p. 239.

  62. 62.

    Loarer, “Cahier A”, Océan Indien Box 2 Folder 10, ANOM, Aix-en-Provence; Loarer, no. 2, “Lois et Coutumes de Douanes, Commerce sous les Divers Pavillons”, ANOM; Guillain, Documents sur l’Histoire, La Géographie et le Commerce, pp. 172, 257, 535.

  63. 63.

    Loarer, ‘Cahier A’, ANOM.

  64. 64.

    Guillain, Documents, Partie II, vol. 2: p. 344.

  65. 65.

    Loarer, ‘Marchandises’.

  66. 66.

    Perhaps intended as a trial run, Waters’ shipment of over 100 cloths worth $280.19 included all the various qualities of the major striping patterns: sarahas [sarasas?], davanas [debwanis], sabony , sederabass, smaliheo [smaili], cocoie [kikoy], maradda, sabaeer [subaya], hodorang [koudrong], saahreah [sohary] as well as the trousere [tausiri], a type associated with Kachchh. See Peabody Essex Museum Library, Richard P. Waters manuscripts, Box 1, folder 2, Zanzibar, February 15, 1841.

  67. 67.

    Emily Reute, Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar (1907; repr. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2009), p. 155. Elderly and poorer men wore black or white silk sashes.

  68. 68.

    General Rigby, Zanzibar and the Slave Trade (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1970), p. 335; Burton, Zanzibar, vol. 1; p. 382; Henry Morton Stanley, How I Found Livingstone. Travels, Adventures and Discoveries in Central Africa (London: Sampson, Low, Marston & Co., 1872), p. 36; Sacleux, Dictionnaire.

  69. 69.

    Ruschenberger, A Voyage, p. 28.

  70. 70.

    Burton, Zanzibar, vol. 1, p. 433. Oscar Baumann, Usambara unde seine Nachbargebiete (Berlin: Reimer, 1891). In Tanga at mid-century, commoners were forbidden from wearing turbans (Burton, Zanzibar, vol. 2, p. 124).

  71. 71.

    Burton, Zanzibar, vol. 1, p. 386.

  72. 72.

    Rigby, Zanzibar and the Slave Trade, p. 335; ‘Note explicative’, Musée d’Histoire Naturelle de Lille.

  73. 73.

    South Asians tended to dress in unique styles of tunics and turbans (Burton, Zanzibar, vol. 1, p. 108). See also Stanley, How I Found Livingstone, p. 3.

  74. 74.

    Burton, Zanzibar, vol. 1, p. 331; Jérôme Becker, Troisième expédition Belge au Pays Noir (Bruxelles: J. Lebègue & Cie, 1889), p. 16; Stanley bought cotton sheeting from the Indian wholesaler Tarya Topan, but had his Swahili guide Jetta chose his coloured cloths from unknown sources (Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, vol. 1, p. 63); Jérôme Becker, La Vie en Afrique ou Trois Ans dans l’Afrique Centrale, 2 vols. (Bruxelles: J. Lebègue & Cie, 1887), vol. 1, p. 45, vol. 2, pp. 438–439. Becker noted that people came from as far as Uganda, Karema and Ou-Rori on Lake Nyassa and Ujiji to buy such provisions in Tabora.

  75. 75.

    James Augustus Grant, A Walk Across Africa (London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1864), p. 158; Stanley, How I Found Livingstone, pp. 14, 180; Burton, Lakes, p. 233. In Tabora, in the 1880 s, two of the biggest merchants were Zeid bin Djouma and Salim bin Raschid (Becker, La Vie, vol. 2, p. 21).

  76. 76.

    Becker, La Vie, vol. 2, p. 448; Stephen Rockel, Carriers of Culture: Labor on the Road in Nineteenth Century East Africa (Portsmouth, CT: Heinemann, 2006).

  77. 77.

    Charles Guillain, “Commerce de Nossi-bé et de la côte ouest de Madagascar: Extrait d’un rapport fait en février 1843”, Revue Coloniale, vol. 1 (1843), pp. 245–279, p. 251.

  78. 78.

    Rigby, ‘Muscat Zanzibar’, p. 244.

  79. 79.

    Anonymous, Correspondance Commerciale Zanzibar, vol. 2, 1852–1865 (25 March 1865), MAE.

  80. 80.

    E. C. Ross, ‘Report on the Administration of the Persian Gulf Residency and Muscat Political Agency for the year 1880–1881’ (Calcutta: Foreign Department Press, 1881), p. 139.

  81. 81.

    Guillain, Documents, vol. 2, p. 343; Guillain elsewhere conceded that he had spent little time in Muscat and so underestimated the level of its commercial activity. See Guillain, ‘Côte de Zanguébar et Mascate’, p. 549.

  82. 82.

    Stanley, How I Found Livingstone, p. 50.

  83. 83.

    J. W. T. Allen (ed. and trans.), The Customs of the Swahili People: The Desturi za Waswahili of Mtoro bin Mwinyi Bakari and other Swahili Persons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). The stores of luxury cloths held by the African Institute in Karema likewise contained ‘rectangles of rehani, sederbaz, soubaya, maharoma, tasseled and embroidered [sic] with gold’. See Becker, La Vie, vol. 1, p. 277.

  84. 84.

    Burton, Lakes, vol. 1, p. 114. Of the 3780 yards of Muscat cloth that Stanley carried on the Emin Pasha expedition, nearly 50 per cent was debwani, 25 per cent sohari, with the remainder consisting in rehani, ismaili and subaya. As examples of particular types of Muscat cloth gifted to or worn by rulers, see Becker, La Vie, vol. 1, p. 357, vol. 2, p. 260; Burton, Lakes, p. 188, 269; Stanley, Through the Dark, 1878, vol. 1, p. 105; John Hanning Speke, Journal of the Discovery of the Nile (New York: Harper, 1863), pp. 22, 171.

  85. 85.

    Becker.

  86. 86.

    Burton, Zanzibar, vol. 2, p. 144.

  87. 87.

    Speke, Journal, pp. 62, 68–69.

  88. 88.

    Becker, La Vie, vol. 1, p. 138. The Arab trader Sayid bin Sayf from Kafurro reportedly paid $516 of cloth to three chiefs in the same area (Stanley, Through the Dark, vol. 1, p. 498).

  89. 89.

    Burton, Lakes, vol. 1, p. 531.

  90. 90.

    Sacleux, Dictionnaire Swahili-Français, Comoros.

  91. 91.

    Alpers, Ivory and Slaves, p. 73.

  92. 92.

    The sabony cloth was made and/or shipped from Sind, the Coromandel Coast and Cambay. See Satya Prakash Sangar, Indian Textiles in the Seventeenth Century (New Delhi: Reliance Publishing House, 1998), pp. 30, 113, 172; Louis Krapf, A Dictionary of the Suahili Language (London: Trubner and Co., 1880); Interview with Rashid Siyabi, Qryat, Oman, November 17, 2011. See also the sabouni in the Waters shipping list of ‘Arab goods’ in note 63.

  93. 93.

    ‘German East Africa’, Commercial Relations of the United States with Foreign Countries (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1898), p. 308; Lieut. T. Postans, ‘Some account of the present state of the trade, between the port of Mandavie in Cutch, and the eastern Coast of Africa’, Transactions of the Bombay Geographical Society, vol. 3 (1839–40), p. 172.

  94. 94.

    Prestholdt, “As Artistry Permits”, pp. 23, 27, 31–32.

  95. 95.

    Ibid., pp. 34–39.

  96. 96.

    Laura Fair, Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post Abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890–1945 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2001); Jonathon Glassman, Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, & Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856–1888 (London: Heinemann, 1995).

  97. 97.

    Glassman, Feasts and Riot, p. 97.

  98. 98.

    Prestholdt, “As Artistry Permits”, p. 20; Glassman, Feasts and Riot, pp. 107, 119. W. F. W. Owen, Narrative of Voyages to Explore the Shores of Africa, Arabia and Madagascar, 2 vols (London: R. Bentley, 1833), vol. 2, p. 155.

  99. 99.

    Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, vol. 1, p. 192.

  100. 100.

    Gillian Feeley-Harnik, ‘Number One—Nambawani—Lambaoany: Clothing as an Historical Medium of Exchange in Northwestern Madagascar’, Michigan Discussions in Anthropology, 14, Ann Arbor (2003) pp. 63–102.

  101. 101.

    Grant, A Walk, pp. 128, 146; Speke, Journal, pp. 184, 203; Burton, Lakes, vol. 1, pp. 194, 523, 531; Becker, La Vie, vol. 1, 152, vol. 2, p. 158; Ludwig von Hohnel, Discovery of Lakes Rudolf and Stefanie, 2 vols., trans. Nancy Bell (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1894), pp. 64, 72; Stanley, How I Found Livingstone, p. 243; Burton, Lakes, pp. 90, 172, 194; J. Frederic Elton, Travels and Researches among the Lakes and Mountains of eastern and central Africa (London: John Murray, 1879), pp. 288, 327, 383; Glassman, pp. 25, 42, 134.

  102. 102.

    Burton, Lakes, p. 397; Joseph Thomson, To the Central African Lakes and Back, 1878–1880, 2 vols (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, Searley & Rivington, 1881); Franz Stuhlman, Mit Emin Pascha ins Herz von Afrika (Berlin: Dr. Reimer, 1894), pp. 216, 717; Stanley, How I Found Livingstone, p. 174.

  103. 103.

    Stanley, How I Found Livingstone, p. 14; Alpers, Ivory and Slaves, p. 159; Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar (London: James Curry, 1987), p. 44; London Evening Post; Rockel, Carriers, p. 49.

  104. 104.

    Alpers, Ivory and Slaves, p. 161.

  105. 105.

    Guillain, Documents, part I, p. 339.

  106. 106.

    David Livingstone, The Last Journals of David Livingstone in Central Africa, From eighteen hundred and sixty-five to his death (London: Harpers and Brothers, 1875), pp. 64, 94.

  107. 107.

    Guillain, Documents, part II, vol. 2, p. 182.

  108. 108.

    In fact, Muscat cloth seems to have carved out markets in Southeast Asia, as indicated by the cloth pattern name javi (‘Java’) (see Table 9.1) and surviving samples that appear in areas such as Sulawesi and Myanmar.

  109. 109.

    Machado, Ocean of Trade; Prestholdt, Global Repurcussions, Goswami, Globalization.

  110. 110.

    Bhacker, Trade and Empire, p. 146.

  111. 111.

    Industrial cotton cloth had a difficult time competing with locally woven raffia cloth, even in Zanzibar, where freemen “struck with the beauty of the fabric [handwoven grass cloth], eagerly exchange their cotton cloths for fine grass cloth” (Stanley, How I Found Livingstone, p. 380; Livingtone, The Last Journals, p. 172).

  112. 112.

    Permitted to men in times of war, silk was believed to offer “physical resistance to the edge of the sword.” See Yusuf Ali, A Monograph on Silk Fabrics Produced in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh (Allahabad: N.W. Provinces and Oudh Government Press, 1900), p. 121.

  113. 113.

    Richard Burton, First Footsteps in East Africa, or An Exploration of Harar (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1856), p. 29; Loarer, ‘Marchandises’.

  114. 114.

    Guillain, Documents, part II, vol. 1, p. 84. Caravaners deployed huge resources to add woven end bands to industrial sheeting to please the many African consumers who refused the cloth otherwise (Hohnel, Discovery, pp. 14, 103; Guillain, “Commerce de Nossi-bé, » p. 248). The creation of these end bands appears to have been Zanzibar’s only loom weaving in the nineteenth century.

  115. 115.

    “German East Africa,” p. 308. Pelly, “Remarks on the Tribes”, p. 98.

  116. 116.

    Rockel, Carriers, pp. 55–56.

  117. 117.

    Where adopted, tailored clothing, too, might be adjusted to local tastes; for instance, being made out of raffia yardage instead of cotton (Stanley, How I Found Livingstone, p. 380).

  118. 118.

    Thomson, To the Central African Lakes, vol. 2, pp. 12, 246, 248.

  119. 119.

    Burton, I. Lake Regions, p. 237.

  120. 120.

    Selemani bin Mwenye Chande, “My Journey Up-country in Africa”, in Swahil Prose Texts, ed. B Lyndon Harries (Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 234. Grant, A Walk, p. 359; Burton, Lakes, vol. 2, p. 238; David Livingstone, Missionary Travels & Researches in South Africa (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1858), p. 426; Stanley, How I Found Livingstone, p. 243.

  121. 121.

    Bhacker, Trade and Empire, p. xxix.

  122. 122.

    ‘Report for the year 1902 on the trade and commerce of Zanzibar’, Diplomatic and Consular Reports: Africa, No. 3063 (London: Harrison and Sons, 1903); H.W. Maclean, Report on the conditions and prospects of British trade in Oman, Bahrein, and Arab Ports in the Persian Gulf, by H.W. Maclean, special commissioner of the Board of Trade-Commercial Intelligence Committee (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1904).

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  1. Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Sarah Fee

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  1. Department of History, Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington, IN, USA

    Pedro Machado

  2. Department of World Cultures, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Sarah Fee

  3. Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Gwyn Campbell

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Fee, S. (2018). ‘The Dearest Thing on the East African Coast’: The Forgotten Nineteenth-Century Trade in ‘Muscat Cloth’. In: Machado, P., Fee, S., Campbell, G. (eds) Textile Trades, Consumer Cultures, and the Material Worlds of the Indian Ocean. Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58265-8_9

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