Trade and Empire in Muscat and Zanzibar

The Roots of British Domination

M. Reda Bhacker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN:
  9780415079976
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134895540
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

M. Reda Bhacker looks at the role of Oman in the Indian Ocean prior to British domination of the region. Omani merchant communities played a crucial part in the development of commercial activity throughout the territories they held in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially between Muscat and Zanzibar, using long established trade networks. They were also largely responsible for the integration of the commerce of the Indian Ocean into the nascent global capitalist system.

The author, himself a member of an important Omani merchant family, looks in detail at the complex relationship between the merchant community and Oman's rulers, first the Ya'ariba and then the Albusaidis. He analyses the tribal and religious dynamics of Omani politics both in Arabia, where he looks especially at the Wahhabi/Saudi threat, and in Oman's sprawling `empire', with particular reference to Zanzibar where the Omani ruler Sa'id b Sultan had his court from 1840. His aim is to consider all Oman's overseas territories as a single entity, without the usual misleading compartmentalisation of African and Arab history.

Dr Bhacker finds that despite their prestige and influence in the region neither the merchant communities nor the government were able to respond to Britain's determined onslaught. Bhacker traces the local and regional factors that allowed Britain to destroy Oman's largely commercial challenge and to emerge by the end of the nineteenth century as the commercially and politically dominant power in the region.

Part I
Prelude to the rise of the Albusaidi dynasty in East Africa

1 Oman’s links with India and East Africa
Historical problems and perspectives

‘It was the Slave Trade which was originally responsible for generating the increased economic interest of the Omanis in the Swahili Coast’.¹ This quotation is a more recent example of the widely accepted view regarding the nineteenth century Omani expansion in East Africa. First of all, slavery as an institution was a centuries-old phenomenon admitted by Omanis themselves, during the nineteenth century, to have existed ‘since the days of [Prophet] Noah’.² Secondly, the theory that the above statement seeks to propound is ill-supported by the available evidence, not least the facts that Oman’s links with East Africa were well established by the nineteenth century and slaves did not constitute the foremost trading commodity in East African markets at the beginning of that century.

Leaving aside the very early links between Omanis and the inhabitants of the East African coast,³ Omani political and economic interests in East Africa were widespread and recognised, as Bathurst has shown, from the mid-seventeenth century under the Ya’ariba.⁴ While Omani rulers, since that time, appointed wâlîs (governors) to various principalities in East Africa, they did not establish any centralised political authority over them. Such a relatively modern European-originated concept of central government did not in fact impinge in any way upon their attitudes of thought nor upon their socio-economic infrastructure which was based on tribalism. Thus, as there never was an extensive and grandiose East African ‘empire’ in the heyday of Kilwa in the thirteenth century, despite the insistence of some early writers on popularising such romantic myths.⁵ Similarly, there was no Ya’rubi nor indeed an Albusaidi ‘empire’ with viable institutions enabling Omani rulers to exercise centralised authority in territories in East Africa, even in those areas where they exercised some degree of control. That control, motivated primarily by the desire to protect trade and to collect duties, was derived from tribal allegiances, political alliances with local rulers and long-established commercial relationships.

Following the demise of the Ya’ariba, various factors combined to undermine the control and debilitate the power base from which the Albusaidis would ordinarily have expected to benefit by virtue of Oman’s tribal system. Prominent among these factors were the turmoil which afflicted Oman during the civil wars of 1719–49; the Persian invasions; the squabbles between members of the newly established Albusaidi Dynasty and between the Albusaidi rulers and other dominant Omani groups both in Oman and overseas; the Omani struggle against European powers and its competition for trade in previously Omani-dominated commercial outlets in India, Africa and the Gulf region and the Omani conflict with the Wahhabis. Against such a multi-faceted economic and political edifice, it is a constant source of wonder that historians attach so much importance to the trading activities at Zanzibar in the nineteenth century and persist in treating them in isolation without the most cursory examination of trade in the Indian Ocean region as a whole in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These earlier commercial activities were the precursors and the catalysts that were to trigger the later rise of the Omani-generated East African commerce. To disregard this crucial aspect is a fundamentally flawed assumption. And while it is true that the increasing European and American incursions and commercial interests in East Africa did give an unprecedented importance to Zanzibar from the third decade of the nineteenth century, it was the ability of the old commercial system in East Africa to fuel these new trends that gave an impetus to the burgeoning and progressively internationalised Indian Ocean economy.

Omani and Indian contributions to Swahili culture

In discussing the rise of Zanzibar in the nineteenth century, the picture most historians present is that ‘following the stabilization of political affairs in Oman under the new Bu Saidi Dynasty’,⁶ Said b Sultan

saw more clearly than his Portuguese counterparts had that his own people possessed neither the skills nor the capital to finance and develop the trading economy of East Africa…. As the power of the Omani state increased in the Persian Gulf, he [Said b Sultan] did everything in his power to attract Asian merchants to Masqat⁷

to finance the trade of his so called ‘empire’. This picture does not withstand closer analysis. As it will be shown below, Asian merchants were involved in Omani commerce since the beginning of the Islamic era. Moreover, it is incontrovertible that the Albusaidi Dynasty, from its very beginnings and throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, had been plagued with dissension and opposition. Said b Sultan’s reign enjoyed nothing approaching even a semblance of ‘stabilization of political affairs’ internally, let alone creating a climate conducive to expansion externally in the Gulf region.

In addition, it is necessary to identify and distinguish those groups which are sweepingly referred to as ‘Asians’ from those alleged to be ‘Said’s own people’. Here we are forced to return to the vexed and convoluted question of the relatively recently introduced European concept of ‘nationality’ discussed in the Introduction. In the above-described view of the rise of Zanzibar, it is generally accepted that Omanis and Asians, relying on Asian capital to finance the slave trade, used slave labour and Swahili intermediaries to develop their clove plantation economy. This is thought to have brought about the prosperity of Zanzibar whose markets, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, were being linked to the world economy. In such a portrayal, it is extremely difficult to distinguish between the ‘Omanis’, the ‘Swahilis’, the ‘Africans’ or the ‘Indians’. Given the long-established historical contacts between Oman, India and the East African coast, and the settlement of groups originating from Oman on this coast, especially during the Ya’rubî period, there must have been elements among the late eighteenth century ‘Swahilis’ which had as impressive Omani credentials as the Albusaidi rulers themselves. In fact, before the spread of the Swahili language and its extensive usage during the twentieth century, these early ‘Swahilis’ may be regarded as more Omani than, say, the Zanzibaris returning to Oman in the 1970s or, for that matter, the Dhofaris who have only recently started to participate in the mainstream of Oman’s socio-economic system. For although these latter ‘Omani’ groups obtained Omani passports without too much difficulty, in the era of re-emergent Arabism of the 1970s many of them could be considered as less ‘Omani’ since they could hardly conduct a conversation in Arabic.

MIGRATIONS AND THE INTERACTION OF COMMERCE AND RELIGION IN OMANI AND SWAHILI CULTURES

Leaving aside the disputes still preoccupying historians as to the original birthplace of the ‘Swahili’ civilisation,⁸ it is generally agreed by most East Africanists that Swahili history and civilisation have for the most part developed from a series of interactions which took place initially on some part of the East African coast or its islands. These interactions are thought to have derived from the responses of indigenous African development in parallel with imported notions from other parts of Africa, from the Middle East, especially from Oman and Yemen in Arabia and from Shiraz in Persia. Although modern East African scholars do make references to Daybul (a port in Sind) and include Wâdebûlî (people from Daybul) among the various Swahili groups,⁹ most of them stop short of actually giving an explicit recognition to any Indian or Asian element within the Swahili culture, despite the fact that ‘it is an established historical fact that Indians were carrying on a prosperous trade with East Africa in the century in which Jesus Christ was born’.¹⁰ Since that time, there have been continuous infiltrations and migratory waves in all directions to and from India, East Africa and Oman.

Moreover, the historical evolution of the religious aspects of Swahili culture has been sorely neglected having been accorded at most a sidelong glance with undue emphasis having been placed on commercial and strategic interests. In general, research on the way heterodox Islamic movements may have affected Swahili civilisation has been inadequate.¹¹ This is not altogether surprising given the preoccupation of Western academia with a preconceived Sunni Islamic orthodoxy, and the tendency of the former to be led by this so-called orthodoxy to reject all other movements as heresies. Western academia has only just begun to move towards a better understanding of Shi’ism and Ibadism, two of the main historical rivals of the self-defined Sunni ‘orthodoxy’. There is thus much ground to be covered before anything approaching a comprehension of the multitude of other bands that make up the spectrum of Islam can be grasped, let alone determine how these affected and provoked the emergence of various splinter groups which rapidly dispersed far and wide to the Atlantic and the Indus and beyond, from the first century of Islam.

In the East African context, the Julanda rulers of interior Oman, unable to resist the invasion of the armies of al-Hajjâj b Yusuf al-Thaqafî, the wali of Iraq under the Umayyad Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik b Marwân (Ali 65–99=AD 685–717), fled to East Africa (Bilâd al-Zinj) sometime between the years 700 and 705 (Ali 81–6).¹² This was apparently ‘a considerable migration, more than a group of entrepreneurs or dissidents’.¹³ As it has been pointed out in ‘Juhaina’, for the Julanda to choose the East African coast indicates that they must have had strong connections there before the time of their migration: ‘It does not make sense that rulers of Oman, Sulaymân and Sa’îd, sons of’Abd al-Julanda, should escape with their families, their supporters and followers to a country or a land devoid of any Omani presence where they could not have had a guarantee for the security of their lives and the safeguarding of their religious beliefs’.¹⁴

Following this migration, there is a long gap of four centuries during which occasional references in the sources are made to some sort of Shi’i and Qarmati influence affecting Swahili culture,¹⁵ while migrations to the coast from the Indian Ocean region at large continued throughout this period.¹⁶

With the establishment of the ‘Shîrâzî’ Dynasty in Kilwa probably at the end of the twelfth century, Kilwa was to reach new heights as it began to wrest from Mogadishu the control of the gold trade of Sofala which served as a coastal entrepôt for the gold, ivory and probably slaves of Great Zimbabwe and Mozambique.¹⁷ It has been suggested that the founding members of the Kilwa Dynasty were Shî’î in religion.¹⁸ Nonetheless, although there were without doubt strong Shi’i influences in Kilwa in the early period, more recent research has shown that the Kilwa Dynasty was in fact Ibadi in origin having close links with Oman.¹⁹ Having said that, we must hasten to add that there is no concrete evidence enabling it to be conclusively determined whether or not there existed a link between these Ibadis and the early eighth century migrants from Oman. Within this religious framework, another important Islamic element, also hitherto neglected, must be analysed: that of the Isma’ili d’awa (literally ‘call’) which appeared in the ninth century and has given rise to recurrent manifestations in the Indian Ocean region since that time and up to the present day.

Apart from commerce, another important reason why these various Islamic movements chose to migrate to East Africa was religious persecution from which these groups fled, as in the case of the Ibadi forerunner, in order to safeguard their own version of Islamic beliefs away from the centre of the expanding Muslim realm.²⁰ The Ismaili movement, from its inception, and throughout most of its history, like many other so-called ‘heterodox’ Islamic movements, is a salient example of how these movements suffered from such persecution, except of course in those times when they themselves had the upper hand, as the Ismailis did, in the era of the Fatimids.

According to Ismaili sources the Ismaili movement, from its beginnings...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FIGURES, MAPS AND TABLES
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CONVENTIONS AND ABBREVIATIONS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: PRELUDE TO THE RISE OF THE ALBUSAIDI DYNASTY IN EAST AFRICA
• PART II: THE ALBUSAIDI MOVE TO ZANZIBAR: EXERCISE IN EMPIRE BUILDING OR SURVIVAL?
• PART III: THE DEVELOPMENT OF OMANI COMMERCE AND BRITISH REACTION
• PART IV: INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL FACTORS IN THE SUBJUGATION OF OMAN
• CONCLUSION
• APPENDICES
• GLOSSARY
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY