In 1948, John Hobhouse, a senior manager of Alfred Holts (or Blue Funnel/ Ocean Steam Ship) the premier British shipping company east to the Straits and China, began to wonder whether it any longer made good business sense to engage in the pilgrim trade.  Since the late nineteenth century, Holts steamers had carried Malay and Indonesian Moslems to-and-from Jidda during the Hajj season; in fact, until the Second World War nearly all Holts ships had been equipped to carry pilgrims, if necessary, to accommodate a traffic with uneven scheduling.  In the late 1940s, still reeling from wartime losses, enjoying a better balance in outbound and homeward cargo volumes, and facing pressure from fading colonial governments to provide superior accommodations and safety facilities, Hobhouse wondered whether "the economics of the trade" did not warrant disengagement altogether.  Advised that this would place the company in very bad odor in the region, especially as Asian shipping would be a far more competitive force in the future, Hobhouse compromised.  Holts would continue to transport Hajjis, but at restricted levels.  "The maximum will be fixed from season to season, and we shall not complain if it is not reached."  Politically, this "diseconomics" of scale seemed the best business decision possible.¹

           Hobhouse's exchanges dislodge two themes I wish to explore in this paper.  First, migration in modern times,² whether long-term or short, has always been a business as well as a movement of peoples.  Steamship companies, agencies, brokers, and labor recruiters responded to the profits to be made by transporting masses of individuals, but in so doing they provided the organization, the means, and often the initiatives by which the great trans-oceanic migrations occurred.  In addition to political, economic, social, and cultural determinants, the history of migrations also possesses a business history.  Europeans introduced the same business logic to moving pilgrims, with comparable consequences, as they did to transporting other populations, or even freight, and this forms the first argument of this paper.

The massive flows of people to the Americas in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, were built upon the regular service, transport infrastructures, and recruitment networks set in place by the great liner companies which, in turn, enjoyed their largest profits via this traffic.³  Restrictive quotas on immigration after the First World War simply intensified business competition or forced companies to concentrate on new traffic routes.  Meanwhile the refugee flows in which the twentieth century specialized opened still new opportunities for shipping companies, brokers, and agencies.  In all these instances maritime business responded to a preexistent migration or refugee "market."  Yet business firms also took initiatives to capture as much business as they could, and thereby to facilitate and promote migratory patterns.⁴ 

           The other great seaborne migration À  of Asian laborers, to plantations, mines, or railroad construction sites in Southeast Asia, Africa, South America, the Caribbean, and the North American Pacific À  was even more integrally a matter of business.  Often purely Asian networks carried this out, although these also worked with European employers or shipping companies. Hong Kong by the late nineteenth century has been described as "a city built largely on an economy of migration," where large numbers of Chinese-controlled businesses serviced and "commoditized" every facet of the traffic.⁵  European participation was diverse.  Shipping companies like the China Navigation Co. (CNCo), part of the Swires enterprises, or the Dutch Koninklijke Paketvaart-Maatschappij (KPM) (a coastal feeder line in the Dutch East Indies) were heavily engaged in the coolie business.⁶   Planters and European trading/agency houses worked closely with these shipping companies, but they also set up their own recruiting offices as was the case with the Deli planters on Sumatra.⁷  On the Coromandel coast, the agency house Binny & Co., part of the larger Mackinnon Mackenzie trading network, recruited labor in the tens of thousands for the rubber estates in Malaya.⁸  The shipping end of this business was then tied to the British India Steamship Company, whose agency Binnys held and which, in fact, was managed by (and financially allied to) Mackinnon Mackenzie.  The networks of nearly all of these enterprises extended in some way to include or overlap those of the Asians.

           European pilgrim transport represented simply one more variation on this business of migration.  But it was also inextricably tethered to imperial business networks that financed, produced, traded, and transported commodity flows and what became of these over the course of the century.⁹  Europeans established a range of imperial enterprises that provided the operational infrastructure for a global economy.  A second argument to this paper, therefore, is that a European-run pilgrim business evolved out of this colonial investment and practice and in fact mirrored wider imperial business patterns, from the deployment and incorporation of indigenous networks to the business consequences of decolonization.  The elaboration of both arguments indicates, moreover, that the business of the Hajj has passed through three periods with two transformations: the business before European entry, the business under the Europeans; and the business following the Second World War and colonial disengagement.  

                                                                           * * *

           Across time, place, and religion, pilgrimages have always possessed an economic or commercial component.  Venice in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries built a profitable business out of its monopoly of the carriage of Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem.¹⁰  Hindu pilgrimages incorporated business still more directly into the religious quest itself, as Ishita Banerjee Dube has described for Puri.¹¹

           In the Muslim world, business and the Hajj have, from earliest times, been inseparable, although how much so has generated debate.¹² Still, if the Hajj was never merely a mercantile affair, it nonetheless was a considerable enterprise that generated commercial returns for those who were in a position to exploit it.  Merchants attached themselves to the great pilgrim caravans.  Bedouins demanded tribute for safe passage; their rapacity and extortion tactics remained the greatest plague for pilgrims into the twentieth century.  Caravan commanders reaped large fortunes from manipulating their control of the budget, and from kickbacks from suppliers or even bedouin tribes wanting part of the action.  The populace of Mecca lived largely off the Hajj.  At the turn of the century, civil and religious authorities, including the Governor and the Sharif of Mecca, evolved a multitude of schemes to fleece pilgrims.  Nothing was untouchable.  Entrance fees were charged for admission to the Kaaba and the previous yearês Kaaba covering was cut into pieces and sold.  One Sharif did a business in Korans.¹³ The modern Saudi state took far more seriously its responsibilities towards the Hajj because it conferred status and international leadership upon kingdom and dynasty.  Yet, until the development of the oil fields after the Second World War,  the Hajj was the Saudisê principal source of revenue, and so for them too it was also a business.¹⁴

           Most of all it was the guides, or  mutawwifs (or muallims, as they were known in India) who turned the Hajj into a business.  Like Hindu pandas, they evolved, over time, guild-like structures that allocated foreign lands, and sometimes provinces, among themselves.  Here they sold their services, recruiting pilgrims for the Hajj and then performing as professional intermediaries during their clienteleês sojourn in Arabia.  Both profession and rights devolved within families from generation to generation, and women mutawwifs were not unknown.  For each country or peoples there was a separate cadre of mutawwifs.  As a business operation they worked through networks of agents or brokers, not infrequently relying on relatives.  

           The mutawwifs were, to a degree, indispensable.  Nearly all foreign pilgrims needed an Arab guide who knew their language and could instruct as to prayers and rituals for specific occasions.  Guides, moreover, performed a multitude of useful functions.  They arranged meals and lodgings, camel and tent hire to Arafat and Medina, and the purchase of sheep for sacrifice. They served as a mail drop or safety deposit box.  In short, they acted as an all-inclusive tour operator would today.  But nearly everyone who wrote about the mutawwifs described them as pests and predators. Their abuses ranged from lying about costs to milking their charges dry, not only through transaction cuts they received on every purchase, but also by encouraging unnecessary expenses or operating kickback schemes.  So bad was their reputation that in the 1930s colonial governments instituted a black list of the worst offenders.  Yet the mutawwif system was institutionally ingrained, and not so easily disposed of.  It was also a reminder that some business organization was necessary for the pilgrimage to work, as was the case with all mass movements of peoples.¹⁵

           European organization of the pilgrim trade in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries must be set against this background.¹⁶  What the Europeans added were two things.  First, their steamship services, particularly following the opening of the Suez Canal, made mass transport by sea more accessible than ever before, especially for the more distant populations of Southeast Asia.  Hajji travel by sea had always been an alternative to the large overland caravans and by the first half of the nineteenth century, sea travel had come to predominate.  But the total number of Hajjis had declined to only forty-to- fifty thousand per year.¹⁷  Once the Suez canal increased the economic feasibility of steamship service to Asia, however, European liner companies seized more fully on the opportunities presented by the pilgrimage to Mecca.  Offering a passage that was quick, regular, and relatively secure, the shipping companies induced more and more Muslims to make the pilgrimage by sea.  In 1885, out of perhaps 70,000 Hajjis, 31,000 journeyed by sea.  In 1909 71,000 came by sea and in 1913 over 96,000 arrived at the port of Jidda (out of perhaps a total of 200,000 pilgrims in each year).  Pilgrimage figures in the interwar years fluctuated in accordance with economic swings and political instability in the Hijaz.  But in 1924 more than 90,000 pilgrims came via ship, and in 1938, following upon a number of abysmal years, the number of sea voyaging pilgrims was approximately 67,000.¹⁸  Even more telling are the figures for the Dutch East Indies, where steamship travel made a substantial difference.  Towards the mid-nineteenth century, perhaps 2,000 Indonesians embarked on the Hajj each year.  By the early twentieth century this number increased to over 10,000.  The figures for 1914, depending on the source, range from 28,427 to 35,135.  In 1926/27, the peak interwar year, approximately 52,000 Indonesians voyaged to Mecca.   Numbers plummeted in the depression, but by the late 1930s they again climbed above the 10,000 mark.¹⁹  Other factors À economic development and commodity price rises and questions of Islamic identity À contributed to the swell.  But the introduction of merchant steamship service and the arrangements companies made played an important role as well.²⁰

           By the late nineteenth century, shipping pilgrims to Mecca and back had become a big business.  As many as two thousand pilgrims might be carried on a single voyage.  British, Dutch, French, Italian, Russian, Greek, and German lines, either through scheduled service or charters, transported pilgrims to Mecca (Jidda) and back.  Persian, Indian, and other non-European businessmen also ran pilgrim ships.  Increasingly a purely business proposition, transport of pilgrims to Mecca invited all kinds of shady or inept operators who sought a quick killing to the misfortune of their Hajji passengers.²¹

           Regardless of such periodic abuses, the bulk of seagoing pilgrims traveled on ships run by European liner services and often designed with pilgrim carriage in mind.  European carriers dominated the three great pilgrim sea routes: The Khedivial Mail Line for the passage from Egypt; the Mogul Line, managed by Turner, Morrison, for India; and a British/Dutch consortium of Holts, the Rotterdamsche Lloyd (RL), and the Stoomvaart Maatschappij •Nederlandê (SMN) for travel from the Straits and Indonesia.  The latter was considered the cream of the trade.  All three companies had engaged in pilgrim carriage since the late nineteenth century.  At the end of the 1920s (although perhaps more informally at the turn-of-the-century), they coordinated their operations under the name, Kongsi Tiga, and ran ships custom-built to combine pilgrim and cargo transport during the pilgrim season, and then to operate as freighters the remainder of the year.  For all three companies the trade was sizeable.   Holts figures (1920-1948) show a total of 20,590 pilgrims carried by the company in 1920, varying throughout the decade with a high of 30,175 in 1926/27.  The numbers dropped through most of the 1930s but recuperated to over 10,000 in 1937.  SMN figures indicate 10,231 company pilgrims in 1920/21 and 12,404 in 1927-28.  RL documents show 10,000 company pilgrims in 1927 and list Kongsi Tiga figures for 1929 as 32,521.  These dropped to a low of 2845 in 1933/34 before rising to over 10,000 by the end of the decade.  There is obviously some clash between one set of statistics and another, but even taking the lower end of the scale, pilgrim carriage for all of these firms was often good business.²²

           The second thing Europeans brought to the Hajj was unalloyed commercial motivation and the rationalized business structures that were its complement in the modern age.   For European shipping companies, merchant profit was not an accompaniment but the raison dêetre of their participation.  They applied to their pilgrim trade the same business logic as governed any other market.  Consequently they organized a pilgrim business that came to resemble mass transport in general, and the style of doing business in imperial lands in particular.  Europeansê goal was to make money, but they also provided the infrastructure and logistical expertise that, in addition to steamship technology, made possible the sea transport of tens of thousands in any given year to Mecca.  As colonial enterprises, shipping firms benefitted from the preferential allotments they received from their respective imperial administrations.  But a concern for pilgrim welfare and religious and political tranquility in turn governed imperial decisions and concessions went to those companies that could assure the smooth and routine carriage of their passengers across thousands of sea miles and avoid the horrors of the less scrupulous or capable.  It was their mastery of transport on a global scale, and the ease with which they could transfer knowledge and resources to the carriage of Hajjis, that accounted for the Europeansê preeminence in the pilgrimage business in the era of steamships.  The companies lived by the empire because they provided what the empires desired, and because they fitted the philosophical as well as power rationales that underlay imperialism.

           Running a successful pilgrim business posed formidable challenges.  Scheduling required coordination with feeder services, the slotting of vessels in a highly seasonable traffic, fitting tight windows for arrival in Jidda, and, once the pilgrimage ended and Hajjis crammed back into the port in a rush to get home, the provision of return vessels without the loss of too much dead time in berth.  Nonetheless, shipping companies fashioned a routine operation that ran like any other phase of their business.  Applying the organizational skills they had worked out for carriage of peoples and goods across the globe, they commercially formatted the pilgrim trade and turned complexity into matter-of-factness.

           More effective still, was the network of agents, brokers, and assorted contacts the shipping companies constructed, or drew upon, to manage the logistics.  To understand how this worked, it is necessary to take a closer look at the relationship between imperial and indigenous business in general.  European merchants in imperial lands neither entirely displaced local networks nor constructed a separate sphere of their own.  Rather they superimposed their own sets of operations upon pre-existent indigenous ones or they built webs of relationships with indigenous firms that provided entry to markets, clients, and cargoes.  In West Africa, for example, French trading companies constructed their chains of trading stations along traditional caravan routes and worked with a corps of African canvassers or intermediaries with commercial traditions, like the Yorubas.  In East Africa, the merchant house of Smith Mackenzie (affiliated to the wider Inchcape group) traded through well-established connections with local bazaar houses or commission agents like Shah & Co. in Uganda.²³ 

           Networks operated by Swires, one of the oldest and largest agency houses in China, provide a more complete example.  The firm managed Blue Funnel business in East Asia.  It also controlled a river and coastal shipping firm -- China Navigation Company À that sailed boats up and down the Yangtze and along the China coast.  CNCo ran a large migrant labor trade between southern China and Southeast Asia.  They worked this traffic, however, through their association with indigenous coolie brokers who managed recruitment and reception services for them.  In Swatow the broker was Nam Kee, which possessed a sizeable organization of its own with branches in Bangkok and Singapore.  Nam Kee engaged cargo as well as passengers for company ships.  Yet Nam Kee was only one link to a still wider set of networks through which Swires did practically all its business.  For cargo procurement, Swires worked with or through Chinese freight forwarding houses known as hongs.  These could be powerful firms, or form powerful combines, controlling access to shippers.  Swires and CNCo developed a series of relationships with cargo brokers that either operated as hongs or provided Swires with connections to them.  

           The central figures in all these linkages were the companyês compradores, who acted as social and business go-betweens with the Chinese business networks.  Often these compradores had a financial investment in hongs.  Prestige, financial standing, social as well as business skills, knowledge of markets and traders, and personal (or family) connections hallmarked the successful compradore.  Often they made the difference in attracting cargo of any sort.  As Swires demonstrates, the business of moving people in imperial waters depended upon, and operated through, a series of overlapping networks between European and indigenous firms.  Swires required Nam Kee for its Southeastern coastal trade, but it was also Swiresês wider networks and its ability to construct a far-flung business empire out of these, that made the Nam Kee relationship meaningful.²⁴

           Transporting Hajjis operated largely along the same lines.  Here too, European shipping companies built their business upon the mutawwif networks already in place, and then worked these into the wider networks they were assembling.  Kongsi Tiga documents are most explicit in this regard: brokers, dispersed throughout the archipelago, recruited pilgrims for Kongsi Tiga ships.  Mostly these brokers were associates of the mutawwifs working the DEI as their territory, although these mutawwifs also figured on the books as Kongsi Tiga agents.  A 1929 list discusses ten brokers some working for all three Kongsi Tiga companies, others concentrating their harvest on one, and many often working through family ties.²⁵

            The broker system was essential to the smooth running of the Kongsi Tiga, which in turn was considered the Rolls Royce of the pilgrim shipping business.  Brokers throughout the DEI publicized and  recruited for the Hajj, supervised proper documentation for departing the DEI and entering Arabia, handled through-passage ticketing, coordinated operations locally, and oversaw collection and reception of pilgrims at the focal harbors in their region.  The flow of information they provided was indispensable for the coordination of Kongsi Tiga scheduling, particularly since many pilgrims in outlying regions were transported in KPM feeder ships to collection ports where the larger pilgrim ships then docked.  Traveling to Makassar in 1948, when everything was in transition, Jacobsz Rosier reported to the Kongsi Tiga on the confusion that now governed pilgrim affairs, in contrast to the old system they had operated through their Muslim agents.  Paperwork was a mess, and the precise information that the companies had received on arrivals, numbers, and connections before the war was nowhere to be had.   "Nothing" he concluded, "about this [new] organization is going to make us forget our well-tested brokers."  And amidst the general confusion of the 1950 Hajj season, Indonesian officials found themselves compelled "to entreat the Kongsi Tiga to designate a number of her skilled ex-brokers who, invested with full power, are to be sent to the various pilgrim centers where they will take the necessary steps to promote as much as possible a successful transport of pilgrims."²⁶

           On a larger scale, the Europeans mastered the mass transport of pilgrims because they drew on the full resources shipping companies instituted for transporting peoples and commodities from one world point to another.  Carrying pilgrims to Mecca differed little from the larger business of migrations or even from shipping cargo across oceans and hemispheres.  The same application of scheduling, planning, and  logistical controls pertained throughout, as did the process of building and cementing networks that formed the basis of all ocean transport.  Every shipping company fashioned its networks of agents, representatives, and contacts, and then sustained these through the mechanism of the business trip.  The pilgrim business repeated this system and was folded within it.  The Rotterdamsche Lloyd appointed the large Rotterdam trading company, Internatio, as its agent in the East and relied on it to manage its DEI business, including pilgrim affairs.  In Jidda, the company established an agency link with Van de Poll & Co. (International Agencies Ltd. in the post- World War II years),²⁷ and routed the connection through Internatio in Batavia.  Later, in the 1950s, prospecting for new pilgrim markets, the RL turned for advice and support to Diethelms, its agent in Bangkok, and to Volkart Brothers, its agent on the subcontinent.²⁸  Business trips held the whole RL network together, and the practice was extended to the commerce in pilgrims.  Internatio representatives traveled to consult with their brokers, and their reports read like those Internatio agents wrote after networking visits to plantations on Sumatra or to shippers and importers throughout the archipelago.  Likewise the travels of two Internatio agents to pilgrim brokers on Madoera in 1928 (sixty pilgrims booked for this ship, twelve booked for another) recall the slog of Holland America Line canvassers for tourists or emigrants in the Netherlands.²⁹  All these procedures were commonplace in the operation of a complex international enterprise.  Binnyês business in migrant laborers from India to Malaya drew upon the vast Mackinnon Mackenzie networks and its ties to British India Steam Navigation Company.  Swiresês business in migrant workers from China to Singapore exploited its own layers of networks, but also the still more expansive Holts system.  By the twentieth century Europeans had not simply entered the pilgrim business.  They had  incorporated it into their extensive organizations and used these to determine how, and how well, it functioned.

                                                                           * * *

           European maritime commerce in imperial waters altered forever after the Second World War, largely as a consequence of four factors.  First, decolonization rewrote the balance of power in business relations.  Either subtly or bluntly, post-colonial regimes pressured traditional European enterprises in shipping, trading, cultivation, mining, and timber to divest, or in the case of Indonesia by the end of the 1950s, to go altogether.  Second, trade flows shifted.  The bulk of European traffic concentrated now on exchanges between one developed economy and another.  Third, non-Western business competition intensified.  The importance of an indigenous business presence before 1945 should not be minimized, but competition, or simply growth and expansion, led to a supplanting of traditional European enterprises (or markets) by local ones in the second half of the century.  Fourth, air transport crowded out the ocean passenger trade.  Business in former colonial lands continued, but the old imperial arrangements firms had established since the nineteenth century disappeared.

           What became of Hajj business, particularly in Southeast Asia where it had been most developed,  paralleled these patterns.  European shipping companies sought to rebuild their pilgrim trade in a hostile environment, but the task was impossible.  Instead state-run pilgrim programs assumed a leading, organizing role and rival non-western companies increasingly entered the market.  For European companies the raison dêetre of pilgrim business consequently metamorphosed, from economic profit to protecting wider shipping investments.  Even the pursuit of commercial returns conformed to this altered context.  The Banque de lêIndochine opened a Jidda branch in the late 1940s to service pilgrim banking needs, but this was part of its strategy to diversify geographically in the face of uncertain prospects in its home territory.  CNCoês acquisition of Holtsês Malay pilgrim business in 1953 "redressed the loss of its long-standing Straits emigrant service from South China to Singapore and Penang, which had been terminated by the Chinese Government in 1949."³⁰  What endured, however, was the pervasive business spirit Europeans had introduced into the mass transport of people.  Pilgrimage was still a big business, and, given the ever-increasing numbers of Hajjis, could only function as such.  One sign of this was the conversion of state-sponsored organs and mutawwifs to more corporate-like structures.  Another was that seaborne carriage remained very much a business transaction.  Moreover, whereas Europeans had subsumed pre-existent networks into the larger ones they constructed, postwar pilgrim organizations, to work effectively,  now incorporated the Europeansê broker system, and often the same individuals, into their operations.  Finally, once air transport replaced shipping as the principal vehicle of overseas transport, the Hajj shed more and more its migratory features and came to resemble more closely mass tourism.

           During the war pilgrims continued to make the journey to Mecca, but they did so in fewer numbers and under difficult conditions.³¹  At warês end, large expectations for renewed flows were not met, at least in the short term.  What happened, especially in Indonesia, is again instructive of how the pilgrim trade reiterated the story of colonial business.  European businessmen returned practically in the baggage trains of Allied Forces to reconstruct firms closed, ravaged, and burned under the Japanese occupation.  Under difficult conditions they reassembled the pieces of their networks, using their reservoirs of expertise and contacts.  But they could not restore the imperial foundations upon which the other rested, and so the enterprises foundered.  Something similar occurred for the Kongsi Tiga companies.   During the war their broker networks had gone to ground, and agency connections were in a sad state.³²    Compounding the problem were the same political disruptions and violence that frustrated efforts to rebuild plantations during the final stages of Dutch military efforts to retain, unsuccessfully, a hold on their colony.  Throughout the late 1940s guerillas in South-Borneo waged an intimidation campaign against prospective Hajjis, threatening them and their families with arson or death.³³  Nevertheless, the Kongsi Tiga managed to restore its operating networks and rebuild some semblance of its former business.  Following independence the European companies continued to transport pilgrims, but under changed conditions and only until the Dutch were driven out of the Indonesian pilgrim business altogether by the end of the 1950s.

           Post-colonial business in pilgrim traffic then followed two evolutionary paths.  First, states assumed control over the organization and conduct of pilgrimage.  However they failed to exercise successful command of the business end, thereby retaining, if only briefly, a space for the traditional European companies who had dominated the trade because they could effectively transport masses of pilgrims on a routine basis from Southeast Asia to Mecca and back.  In Indonesia, where the Ministry of Religion intervened in pilgrim affairs, an Indonesian shipping company À Musi À formed with expectations that it would come to replace Kongsi Tiga monopolization of pilgrim transport.³⁴  But for many years Musi was limited to chartering activities, and even then its reach exceeded its grasp.  The government canceled the 1951Hajj in the wake of plague rumors, but in reality their shipping arrangements were a disaster.  As Holts told it:

Once again, the role of business organization and acumen strikes one as pivotal to the successful movement of pilgrims in the steamship (or motorboat) age.

           Under these conditions, the Indonesian Government could scarcely dispense with the services of the Kongsi Tiga companies or its agents.  Already in the early stages of the formation of the Indonesian Republic, various state-run pilgrim agencies had incorporated Kongsi Tiga brokers into leadership positions.  This state of affairs scarcely displeased the European shipping companies, even if it augured the reverse absorption of networks they had initiated half a century earlier.³⁶  Until Indonesian-Dutch relations sundered, the shipping firms continued to transport thousands of pilgrims, although foreign exchange and subsidy restraints limited the number of actual Hajjis.³⁷  However, relations under the post-colonial regime remained tenuous, and demands for more attention to the comfort and welfare of seafaring pilgrims placed serious constraints on the financial rewards to be garnered.   As a business, the pilgrim trade no longer made good economic sense, and rationales altered accordingly.  By the first years of independence, Hobhouseês uncertainties had translated into company policy:

           The Dutch companies, with far more to lose, were hesitant to adopt this position entirely.  Yet even as they prospected  for pilgrim traffic from other lands, they clearly could see the writing on the wall.  In  1960 the Dutch Mails (the RL and SMN) were expelled from Indonesian waters, and by 1966, if not earlier, they were out of the pilgrim business altogether.  Holts hived off its Straits/Malaysian service to the CNCo, which was in search of a replacement for its disappearing coolie traffic, in 1953.  Blue Funnel continued to carry Indonesian pilgrims into the 1960s, but ran only one ship on this service.  Similarly, the British India Steamship company, transporting pilgrims from Pakistan and totaling up their losses at the end of the Fifties, came to the conclusion that there was little future for European liner firms in this business.  Having emerged and thrived as a colonial business, the transport of pilgrims was now going the way of other, formerly colonial enterprises.  Disengagement, and concentration on other trades was the course they, too, would have to set for the future.³⁹ 

           Yet pilgrimage remained what it had always been, a business alongside a religious quest. The second path to emerge out of the post-colonial pilgrim trade was for non-Western states and entrepreneurs to assume the business functions, and styles, that had previously pertained most of all to Europeans.   In Malaysia, for example, the Lembaga Urusan dan Tabung Haji (LUTH), which ran pilgrim affairs by the end of the Sixties, operated its own chartering and travel agency business and came to dominate the travel arrangements of nearly all Malay Hajjis.  LUTH absorbed the broker system that had persisted along the east coast of the country, again reversing the earlier colonial cooption of indigenous networks.  It subsumed the Malayan Muslim Pilgrimsê Savings Corporation and invested that money in a variety of enterprises.  It negotiated its own contracts with the mutawwifs, who, by the late 1970s, were coming to be described as "corporate operators."  Some of the most successful now handled up to 10,000 Hajjis each.⁴⁰

           Business transactions mushroomed in the traffic in pilgrims, but whereas in the past the initiatives had largely been European, more and more they originated from non-Western sources.  In Siam in the 1950s there were at least four or five local companies active in the transport of pilgrims to Mecca.⁴¹  Throughout the same decade, the Dutch Mails were inundated with requests for charters of their ships; a substantial proportion of these came from middlemen (often with official connections) in Jidda, Yemen, Teheran, Morocco, or Karachi who could deliver 1500 pilgrims here, 10,000 pilgrims there, and were looking for charter parties to provide adequate shipping capacity.⁴²  The opening stages in a new phase of globalization À the rivalry and replacement of Western business by non-Western enterprises À had also penetrated the pilgrim business.

           Driving these developments was the enormous growth in post-war pilgrimages.  In the 1950s the numbers were already surpassing the best years of the 1920s, with over half a million Hajjis in 1958.  At the end of the 1960s the total had reached nearly a million, of whom close to half were non-Saudis.  And as the century drew to a close the figures approached the two million level.⁴³  Most "overseas" pilgrims now also came primarily by air rather than by sea.  Egyptês Banque Misr introduced air transport in the 1937 pilgrimage, but on a tiny scale.  In the early 1950s, nearly three quarters of foreign pilgrims arrived in Arabia by ship.  Twenty years later that figure was about twenty per cent.⁴⁴ Air transport was quicker, easier, and cheaper than going by boat.  Even the CNCo gave up the ghost in 1970.⁴⁵

           Voyage by air, combined with greater personal wealth, but also efforts by the Saudis and home governments to limit the duration of sojourn abroad, completely altered the character of the Hajj, rendering it more accessible but "sterile and standardized," compared to what it had been in the past,⁴⁶ and blurring the line between pilgrimage and tourism.  Air transport made the pilgrimage just as much a business as it had ever been before.  But it closed down the movement of peoples by sea, and the maritime business that had effected these flows, and that has been the central concern of this paper.