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

• Published in: Journal of world history Vol. 34; no. 2; pp. 187 - 216
• Main Author: Wint, Hollian
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• 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
• DOI: 10.1353/jwh.2023.a902052
• ISSN: 1045-6007; 1527-8050

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.