Credit mechanisms in nineteenth-century Timbuktu: Evidence of merchant banking in the Arabic documents of Saharan and West African commerce

This paper is an effort to make sense of accounting documents that survive in the papers of Saharan traders, mostly from the nineteenth century. I am interested in these documents as a means of understanding how commercial capital was moved across the Sahara Desert in the nineteenth century, during a moment of transition, before the incorporation of this region into European colonial empires and the redirection of trans-Saharan trade towards the Atlantic and the Mediterranean in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, but after the development of a much more rapidly interconnected world of 'modern' commercial capital. I will suggest that a better understanding of the documentary record of accounting practices in the nineteenth century provides us with some clues about earlier practices, for which documentary evidence is much less robust. The paper focuses on evidence of credit and debt mechanisms, and the functioning of currencies and monies of account in these documents. It is based on a corpus of approximately 900 Arabic letters and documents from the family firm of a merchant originally from the region of Ghadames in present-day Libya, who settled in Timbuktu, in present day Mali in the middle of the nineteenth century.