'From desh to desh': The Family Firm as Trans-Local Household in the Nineteenth-Century Western Indian Ocean

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...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of world history Vol. 34; no. 2; pp. 187 - 216
Main Author Wint, Hollian
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Honolulu University of Hawai'i Press 01.06.2023
University of Hawaii Press
Subjects
19th century
Analysis
Capital
Domestic relations
Families & family life
Family owned businesses
Family relations
Historical methods
Historical research
Historiography
History
Households
International trade
Methods
Petitions
Slavery
Social networks
Success
Transactions
World history
Indian Ocean
Zanzibar
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary: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. Keywords: kinship, trading networks, household, slavery, credit, Indian Ocean.
ISSN:1045-6007
1527-8050
1527-8050
DOI:10.1353/jwh.2023.a902052