F.A. Bishara, A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean 1780-1950, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017, pp. 279, Isbn: 9781316609378.

Reading Bishara’s book it’s like coming home. We could feel the warm, as well as the cold, breeze of the Indian Ocean sea, of that ‘sameness’ together with ‘otherness’ well described by A. Sheriff in his many books and essays. The methodological approach starts from the classical interdisciplinary use of archival, oral, and bibliographical sources. Nevertheless, the use of special documents, testimonies, and private papers such as the waraka (debts) papers reveals the ample breath of this open research issue: how to restudy - and hopefully understand - , the deep and dynamic relationships between Islamic law and economic life in this vast and complex regions such as Arabia and East Africa in the Indian Ocean.