ネットワークのなかの港町とそこにおける所謂「バニヤン」商人 : 一九世紀ザンジバルにおけるカッチー・バティヤー商人の活動

Abstract

By focusing on the activities of the Kachchhi Bhatiya merchants in 19th century Zanzibar, this article grapples with two important issues in the history of the Indian Ocean world that have not received sufficient concrete consideration. One neglected issue is, on the assumption that port towns are understood as places of accumulation and exchange of multiple varieties of people, goods, information, and money, how did the towns organize these multiple flows. The second issue is the "Baniyan merchants" who frequently appear in Western sources that comment on the port towns of the western Indian Ocean. These two issues form the two sides of a single problem in 19th-century Zanzibar. This article focuses on the commercial activities of the Kachchhi Bhatiya who were particularly influential among the "Baniyan" merchants of 19th-century Zanzibar in an attempt to clarify these two issues. The following points have been elucidated on the bases of these considerations. In short, their activities cannot be delimited within a strict definition of commercial traders. Instead, their commercial activities were firmly linked to the sultans of the Al Bu Said dynasty, and in addition they were multifaceted enough to merit being called general trading companies. Moreover, each of their spheres of activity was organically unified in such a manner as not only to support each sphere, but they, for example, used middlemen to acquire funds on a short-term basis from Western merchants, transfer those funds to their sphere of financial operations, and employ those funds for commercial activities of local merchants, and they could be linked through the channel of the Kachchhi Bhatiya to the many varieties of people who assembled in the port towns of Zanzibar without having mutual direct contact with one another. Furthermore, what circulated in each sphere was not limited to goods and money; for example, tax farmers strengthened their relationship of trust with the sultan and that relation of trust spread to have a positive effect on their operations as middlemen with Western merchants, and this trust also became an important factor along with goods and money.