"Translating English into American: Americans, Indians, and Global Trade in the Western Indian Ocean (1825-1875)"

The mid-nineteenth century saw a vast expansion of British imperial might in the Western Indian Ocean. For the established American traders in the region, this meant intense competition on an uneven playing field. The growing British presence pressured indigenous trading systems across the region to conform to European standards of commerce. With empire came technological and social changes. Steam ships, telegraph lines, and mail services all significantly changed the movement of commodities, people, information, and capital. The American headquarters of Zanzibar slowly transitioned from Omani to British control while other traditional ports were superseded by centers of colonial government.
This paper explores the structure and longevity of the commercial relationships at the heart of an Indo-Atlantic trade network between Salem, Massachusetts and Zanzibar. Well established before British economic penetration, Americans and their Indian counterparts co-created a hybridized system of trade that more closely confirmed to indigenous Indian Ocean norms than Atlantic traditions. While their visits to other ports ebbed and flowed, Americans remained firmly wedded to Zanzibar, primarily because of their stable, profitable relationships with the island’s Indian businessmen. Using decades of contracts alongside business communiqués and personal correspondences, I trace how relationships formed in the 1830s prospered and evolved well into the 1870s, often spanning multiple generations of the same merchant family. Instead of reverting to Western trading strictures, Americans increasingly relied on their Indian counterparts to negotiate British policy while also serving their traditional role as middlemen to the region’s Arab and African traders. Building off recent scholarship that centers Indian cooption of imperial structures, I argue that Indian knowledge of British economic systems more than shared Western precepts helped American trade survive increased competition.