The Foundations of the Old Maldivian Economy: Trees, Shells, Dried Fish, and Endowments
For centuries the Maldivian sultanate maintained a tightly organized, state-supervised maritime economy built around a small number of carefully managed natural resources. The core assets were the “three trees” of island survival,coconut palms (Dhivehi Ruh), screwpines (Kashikeyo / Maakashikeyo), and breadfruit (Banbukeyo),together with boli (cowrie shells, Monetaria moneta) and dried fish (hikimas or valhoamas), primarily skipjack tuna processed into durable fillets. Lacking metal ores or broad agricultural plains, the islands measured wealth, food security, and export capacity through these resources. A complementary institution, the Vaguf (Waqf) system of endowments, further bolstered community infrastructure and religious life across the dispersed atolls. Together, these elements facilitated local survival and produced the commodities that attracted Malabar merchants and, subsequently, Portuguese and other European powers into the Indian Ocean trade.
The Inventory System: "Thah Jehun" and the Tree Census
Because the trees themselves constituted capital, the state maintained a physical register directly on the trunks. This practice, known as Rukugai Thah Jehun or simply thah jehun, continued officially until 1976. Island and central officials used a specialized tool,a steel cylindrical tube with a handle on one end and a sharpened cutting edge on the other,struck with a hammer to leave clean, permanent circular marks at a standard height. The number of stamps encoded ownership categories:
1 thah: trees owned by individual people
2 thah: trees owned by a group of people on the island
3 thah: government-owned trees
4 thah: trees owned jointly by government and island people
5 thah: trees planted for shrines
The system applied to both coconut palms and breadfruit trees. Breadfruit and screwpine fruits supplied the primary carbohydrate staples that reduced dependence on imported rice; screwpines were valued for their resilience on sandy, salt-exposed soils as well as for fiber, fruit, and windbreaks. Periodic survey teams from Malé counted and marked these assets, creating a visual, literacy-independent public record that regulated harvesting rights, limited disputes, and supported state revenue from copra and related products.
Oral and family traditions link these surveys to wider maritime expeditions, including those that reached Foalhavahi (the traditional Dhivehi name associated with the Chagos Archipelago). Planting the three trees itself served as an assertion of presence and usable territory. One documented line involves Kerafa Alifulhu Kaleyfaanu, whose father Kerafa Dhandahelu served under Sultan Muhammad Imaaduddeen IV (1835–1882/1883). Kerafa Alifulhu participated in marking inspections and later took his son Mohamed Kaleyfaan on major foalhavahi voyages for "thahjehun"work. Earlier written claims appear in Portuguese records linked to Sultan Hassan IX (later Dom Manuel), who around 1560–1561 asserted sovereignty that included the “seven islands of Pullobay,” a designation Maldivian historians associate with Foalhavahi. François Pyrard de Laval (resident 1602–1607) recorded Maldivian knowledge of distant southern islands and royal expeditions southward.
Boli: The Royal Cowrie Monopoly
Parallel to the tree census ran the sultan’s monopoly over Boli. Collection methods are attested from the ninth century. The Persian merchant Sulayman al-Tajir and the Arab geographer al-Masʿūdī describe islanders cutting coconut branches and throwing them onto the water so the mollusks attached themselves. João de Barros gave a similar account in the mid-sixteenth century. Ibn Battuta, who stayed in the Maldives in 1343-46, recorded that shells were placed in pits until the flesh decayed, leaving the white shell. He noted local units: a hundred called siya, 700 fál, 12,000 Kottey, and 100,000 bostú. At Malé, four bostú (400,000 shells) commonly equalled a gold dinar.
François Pyrard de Laval described boli as a major form of wealth: he saw thirty or forty ships loaded solely with them, all bound for Bengal, where they circulated as ordinary money. Within the islands the shells served as small-change currency and as a tax item; Pyrard noted that the king’s revenues included shares of coco-cordage, boli, and dried fish. The shells were pooled in royal warehouses in Malé. Portuguese ships carried them to the Bight of Benin from at least 1515; later Dutch, English, and French merchants shipped tens of millions more. Over ten billion shells reached West Africa by the late eighteenth century, becoming the principal imported medium used to purchase enslaved people. In Bengal and elsewhere they had long circulated as currency.
Dried Fish (Hikimas): The Protein Pillar and Major Export
Dried fish,especially skipjack tuna processed into hard, long-lasting fillets,completed the classic Maldivian trade package. Archaeological evidence of scombrid remains suggests offshore tuna fishing may date to the ninth century or earlier. The earliest detailed written account comes from Ibn Battuta in the 1340s: each fish was cut into four pieces, slightly cooked, placed in baskets of coconut leaves, and suspended in the smoke until perfectly dry. He recorded its export to India, China, and Yemen. Pyrard called the fishery “of great yield and the chief employment of the islanders,” noting regular shipments to Aceh in Sumatra
Duarte Barbosa (early 1500s) remarked on the “great store of dried fish” carried with cowries to Cambay and Bengal. The hard, smoke-dried fillets required no refrigeration and lasted for months or years, making them ideal for monsoon voyages, shipboard provisions, and long-distance trade. Processing was labor-intensive and often involved women. The cowrie trade itself helped expand the tuna fishery by increasing ship traffic. By the seventeen
Copra, Coconut Oil, and Coir
While fresh nuts supplied daily food and drink, the industrial exports were copra (the sun-dried kernel of mature kaashi) and coir. Communities cracked the nuts, dried the meat, and pressed it in heavy wooden mills (sekku) to extract ruh theu (coconut oil). The fibrous husk was retted and twisted into coir rope (roanu). João de Barros called coir “the commonest and most important merchandise” of the islands and “the cause of their being visited,” because “without it those seas cannot be navigated.” The rope swelled and shrank with the sea, making it superior to hemp for cables and for sewing the planks of traditional vessels. Portuguese fleets in Goa and Cochin relied on it; early sixteenth-century accounts show Maldivian ships carrying coir, dried fish, fabrics, and cowries.
The Vaguf (Waqf) System: Endowments and Community Resilience
Alongside these state-controlled resources was the Vaguf (Waqf) system of endowments, which originated with the conversion of the Maldives in 1153 CE. Wealthy landowners, fishers, and rulers allocated land plots, coconut groves, or other productive assets as perpetual endowments.Revenues supported mosques, tombs, religious education, and related community needs. Copper-plate grants (loamaafaanu) and later documents record the reallocation of lands after the abolition of Buddhist institutions and the establishment of mosques. One well-known example is the Isdhoo Loamaafaau endowment of 1777 CE dedicated to the maintenance of the Isdhoo Mosque. Royal grants from sultans and queens similarly endowed plots and coconut resources for the upkeep of tombs and places of worship. In an archipelago of scattered islands, these endowments helped maintain Islamic institutions and basic community facilities on remote atolls, contributing to local self-sufficiency and the continuity of Islamic identity.
This Islamic identity was itself a central element of Maldivian political cohesion. Resistance to the Portuguese occupation of Malé (1558–1573) and subsequent commercial pressures was framed in terms of defending the faith as well as political autonomy; the expulsion of the Portuguese under Muhammad Thakurufaanu restored both the sultanate and the primacy of Islam. While the Vaguf system did not function as a formal military or tax apparatus, its role in sustaining mosques, religious personnel, and community infrastructure across isolated islands reinforced the social fabric that supported long-term resilience. In later centuries the system declined; many endowments in Malé were relocated or neglected in the 1970s, and formal regulation remained limited until recent revival efforts.
Trade Networks: Malabar, the Portuguese, and Beyond
These products moved along the monsoon routes. Long before Europeans, Malabar merchants were the principal partners. Maldivian dhonis and Malabar ships exchanged copra, oil, coir, cowries, dried fish, and other goods for rice, salt, textiles, and spices that the coral islands could not produce. Portuguese sources describe existing monopolies already farmed to Malabar figures. One such merchant, Muhammad Ali (Mamalle / Mamalle Marakkar) of Cannanore, held an agreement with the sultan for fixed-price exchange of rice, salt, and earthenware against cowries, coir, dried fish, and textiles; he supplied “all the coir for the use of India.” When the Portuguese sought fuller control they imposed the cartaz system, extracted coir and ambergris as tribute, and redirected cowries toward West Africa. Early contacts were violent: in 1503 Vicente Sodré captured Maldivian vessels off Calicut carrying coir, dried fish, and cowries.
In this system the three trees, boli, dried fish, and Vaguf endowments were not merely subsistence resources. Through the physical inventory of thah jehun (marked on trunks until 1976), the royal monopoly on shells, the processing of copra, coir, and tuna into durable hikimas, and the organized export trade, they formed the measurable, controllable foundation of a maritime state economy that linked Maldivian island life to wider Indian Ocean and, ultimately, Atlantic circuits. The marks left by the cylindrical tool on coconut and breadfruit trunks, the kotta baskets of cowries counted in Malé warehouses, the coir that held together ships from Goa to the Bight of Benin, the hard fillets of smoked tuna, and the perpetual endowments that sustained mosques on remote islands were all expressions of the same carefully administered natural and social wealth.
This carefully managed resource base underpinned a far broader maritime reach. Long before European colonial expansion, Maldivian seafarers were accomplished deep-sea navigators who used the monsoon winds to stitch the Indian Ocean together. Their voyages extended to the East African Swahili Coast, where oral traditions and historical accounts preserve memories of their influence. Along this coast, Swahili records refer to a skilled group of seafaring islanders known as the Wadiba (singular Mdiba, from Diba or Dibajat,the medieval Arabic and Sanskrit-derived term for the Maldives and related island groups). Scholars such as Sir John Gray (1954) and dictionary compilers like Sacleux identified the Wadiba with inhabitants of the Maldives. Traditions credit them with bringing cowrie currency, introducing or refining specialized sewn-plank boat-building techniques that influenced the iconic Swahili mtepe vessels (sewn with coir), and advancing coconut cultivation and related technologies such as toddy tapping. Some accounts from the Lamu/Bajuni area describe shipwrecked “islanders” teaching local people new vessel designs. Dried fish, as a portable protein source, likely formed part of the provisions and trade goods that sustained these long-distance contacts. While these traditions are layered, they reflect real monsoon-driven exchanges of technology, currency, botanical knowledge, and preserved foods.
The same pillars that sustained the islands,marked palms, controlled cowries, processed coir and copra, dried tuna fillets, and Vaguf endowments,thus projected Maldivian maritime culture and Islamic institutions across the ocean, leaving traces in Swahili boat-building, agriculture, cuisine, and oral memory that remain visible in the historical record of the western Indian Ocean.
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