THE GULFS Let Us Now Move from Africa to the Arabian Peninsula

CHAPTER FOUR

THE GULFS

Let us now move from Africa to the Arabian Peninsula, which is an environment that has had important eff ects on the economic and social histories of East Africa. Th e ruling elites of the Swahili Coast trace their descent either to Persia or to the Arabian Peninsula, and so do groups in Madagascar such as the Antemoro. Th is furthered the sale of products from both Yemen and Oman not only on the Mrina Coast, but also to the Comoros and the “scales” of Northwestern Madagascar, which were in cultural and social terms closely linked to the Mrina Coast. Th e Hadramawtis in particular had long looked to East Africa as nearly their own land. And they traded and migrated to East Africa as before: “my lord” the prince of Fasa wrote António de Albuquerque Coelho “know that the people of Pate only want ivory to sell it to the caxes and to the other Arabs” (caxes probably equates to qazis or soldiers of the faith—the traditional nomination for the Hadramawatis). In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Hadramis were of relatively low prestige on the Mrina Coast, but that seems to have been a direct result of Omani rule; this was not yet the case in the eighteenth century.1 Th is particular prestige of Arabian products may solve a minor mystery: excavation in Madagascar have found considerable amounts of Chinese and Persian porcelain in Boina Bay, which must have been imported there during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Th is is rather mysterious given that the VOC, the EIC, and the C.d.I. were not known to sell any porcelain in Madagascar.2 However, while the Europeans did not sell much porcelain there, they did sell it in bulk in Yemen. Th is was such an important market that the Company’s ship Stinger Galley in 1709 was fi rst sent all the way to Canton to buy tutenag—a copper-lead alloy—copper, sugar, and 400 chests of porcelain, and the ship then sailed to Mocha to purchase

1 HAG, LM, 97 A, March 1729, fol. 174; F. le Guenec-Coppens, “Social and Cultural Integration: A Case Study of the East African Hadramis” Africa/International African Institute 59 (2) (1989), pp. 185–95. 2 P. Verin, Th e History of Civilisation in Northern Madagascar (Rotterdam, 1986), pp. 226–39. 186 chapter four coff ee from the proceeds of the earlier sales. Th e porcelain consisted of the typical Chine de Commande for the Islamic market: “most coarse Chinaware, the rest fi ne but to have no fi gures of men, birds or shes, fi only of fl owers, trees and plants.” Th is ought not to have been especially diffi cult for the Chinese craft smen; the fabrication of these products for Yemen and Africa preceded that for Europe by more than seven hundred years. Archeological sites in East Africa can conveniently be dated by shards of such Chinese porcelain.3 I surmise that most of the porcelain was meant for sale on the Swahili Coast and in Madagascar, which accounts for it being found there in bulk. For the Swahili Coast was in the eighteenth century still a major market for Chinese porcelain—Edward Chandler on the Fame sold mostly Chinese porcelain in Pate in 1754, which was exchanged for ivory. Although certainly not as much as Oman, Yemen to some extent still shared in the prosperity of the Swahili Coast in the eighteenth century.

4.1 The Arabian Peninsula

4.1.1 Hadramawt Th e economic record of the eighteenth century in Arabia shows considerable variation. Aden’s decline started in the late sixteenth century and the early seventeenth, when Middle Eastern traders fi rst began to purchase coff ee in bulk in Yemen, while the trade in pepper faltered. Th is gave rise to new ports in the Tihama region, two of which essen- tially specialized on the transport of coff ee and of coff ee alone: Loheia and Hudeida. Th e third one, Mocha, had by 1620—and particularly aft er the Ottoman retreat from the Tihama in 1629 to 1635—become a direct rival. Under the Osmanli rule Mocha appears to have been primarily a military base supporting the operations of the Ottoman fl eet operating off the Somali Coast and in the Red Sea.4 However, under the Zaydi Imams of Sa’na the city became the central entrepôt for trade between India, Syria, and Egypt. Unlike Aden, Mocha possessed an immediate

3 OIOC E/3/96, DB, 6 January 1709, fol. 590. 4 BL, Add. 20,809, 1607, fol. 107; VOC/OB 1130, “Rapport van den opperkoop- man Pieter van den Broecke”, fol. 1309, cf. M. Moghul, Osmanlilar’in Hint Okyanusu Politikasï (Istanbul, 1974).