For Allah, Mammon, and Empire: Islamic Law and Capitalism in Oman and the Indian Ocean, c. 1880–1915

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the Arabian port city of Muscat was undergoing tremendous changes. From the 1880s onward, the date trade through the port had grown to an unprecedented scale and scope, being transported on steamships to markets as far away as New York. At the same time, the advent of a printing press on the former colony of Zanzibar emboldened a generation of Muslim jurists, many of whom had an ambivalent stance towards capitalism and the changes it brought with it.

Caught in the middle of these changes were two important figures: Ratansi Purshottam, a member of Muscat’s long-standing Indian merchant community, and one of the port’s leading date merchants; and his contemporary, Abdullah ibn Humaid al-Salimi, the Omani interior’s leading Muslim jurist, and a figure largely opposed to the innovations that expanding commerce brought. The two seemed to stand on opposite ends of the transformations that were shaking Oman’s coasts and interior: one was a conservative jurist who had never left the Omani interior, and the other a merchant-moneylender embedded in trans-regional flows of capital and commodities.

This paper argues that the two figures, both separately and together, were integral to the emergence of modern capitalism in Southeast Arabia. It draws on Purshottam’s letters and promissory notes, and combines them with writings by Al-Salimi to create a microhistory grounded in these two figures – one which traces the emergence of a discourse in Islamic law that was willing to adapt to the needs of modern capitalism, and which saw a place for non-Muslim participants. Rather than posing them in opposition to one another, it explores how the era of emerging modern capitalism produced both figures, and how their work and histories owed more to one another than either would have thought.