Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar. Abdul Sheriff
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and the British navy were objectively the vanguard:
It is to me as clear as the sun that God has prepared the dominion of East Africa for the only nation on the earth which had public virtue enough to govern it for its own benefit . . . I have taken my own line to the honour of God and my King and to the benefit of my country and of all mankind.42
Owen, however, was a premature manifestation of British capitalism; it sought at this stage an empire without boundaries, economic domination through free trade, and indirect political control through subordinate states rather than the heavy burden of a colonial empire.
Abolition of the slave trade was certainly high on the agenda of the British government at this time. It had just negotiated with the Sultan the Moresby Treaty which prohibited the export of slaves to the Americas and European colonies in the Indian Ocean. But the Omani governor of Lamu seems to have understood the British strategy of restricting and ultimately abolishing the slave trade better than Owen himself. As he shrewdly put it, the unification of the East African coast under the Sultan was essential, ‘for not until then will the British have power to put an effectual termination to the Slave Trade.’43 As regards the wider strategy in the western Indian Ocean, the British government had already chosen its surrogate. It therefore had little interest in jeopardising a laboriously constructed strategy for British paramountcy, in which Oman played a central role, by supporting a smaller power in East Africa. In 1823 the Governor of Bombay had replied to the Mazrui request for British protection by saying that ‘fidelity to our engagements with His Highness the Imam of Muscat would prevent our acceding to your proposal.’ When Owen declared the protectorate anyway, the Bombay governor argued strenuously that the Sultan of Oman:
has always been our faithful and cordial ally and not only has he cooperated with us in all our attempts to put down piracy in the Persian Gulf, but has on more than one occasion refrained from enterprises that promised to be profitable to him, because we represented to him that his engaging in them would be inconsistent with our policy.44
Faced with the outstretched hands of two suitors clamouring for protection under their hegemony, the British accepted that of their old and faithful protégés, the Busaidi, who were not only already subservient to British power, but were also still capable of subjugating Mombasa to their own, and ultimately, therefore, to British overlordship.
British protection over Mombasa was therefore withdrawn in 1826, but anxious not to provide an opening for the French the British government recommended a policy of conciliation with the Mazrui to the Omanis. Deprived of British support, the Mazrui were now forced to compromise. They were prepared to acknowledge formal Omani suzerainty and resume payment of tribute, but they demanded a confirmation of their hereditary claims to the governorship and refused to surrender Fort Jesus. Although the Sultan was unable to take Fort Jesus by force of arms, and unable to keep it when he took it by treachery, the economic blockade that he imposed on Mombasa began to create severe strains in the network of alliances which had formed the basis of Mombasa’s independence. Its collapse facilitated the final coup de grace in 1837. The leading Mazrui were either deported or fled to establish their own petty states along the Kenya coast. However, the merchant class of Mombasa, consisting of the other Arabs, the Swahili and their Mijikenda allies, were incorporated within the emerging Omani commercial empire.45
Conclusion
The common experience of Portuguese oppression had brought together the Swahili and Omani merchant classes in a partnership to overthrow Portuguese rule north of Cape Delgado. But that partnership was unequal. Though they pretended to walk on high stilts of political independence, the Swahili merchant classes were politically too fragmented and economically too dependent on international trade to stand on their own feet. The Omanis, on the other hand, had started from the interior which provided a more secure economic and political base for their independence. However, with the rise of the merchant class to political dominance the centre of economic and political gravity shifted to the coast, and the economy and the state became increasingly dependent on international trade. This shift, moreover, coincided with the rise of capitalism in Europe and the inauguration of an epoch of world domination by capital. The merchant class flourished with the expansion of international trade that the rise of capitalism entailed. But the Omani state that they ruled was simultaneously subordinated, being converted into a compradorial state that acted as an economic and political agent of the foremost capitalist state of the era, Britain.
Through the agency of Omani expansionism the East African coast thus began to be integrated, if indirectly, into the international capitalist-dominated system. However, other economic forces, emanating also from the development of capitalism, began to impinge directly on the East African coast from the last quarter of the eighteenth century, more effectively integrating it into the system, economically and ultimately politically.
Notes
1. The word ‘Swahili’ is derived from the Arabic word which means the coast. It is used to refer to Kiswahili, a Bantu language with a considerable number of Arabic, Persian and Indian loanwords, betraying its maritime and mercantile history. It is also used to refer to Waswahili, coastal people who speak the language and are generally Muslim, and to the coastal Muslim culture generally. See Nicholls, p. 19; Prins (1965), pp. 24–7, 38–49; Whiteley (1969), p. vii; Krumm, p. 2.
2. Kirk, pp. 263–7; McMaster, pp. 13–24; Datoo (1974), pp. 23–33.
3. Sheriff (1975a), pp. 12–13.
4. ibid., p. 11; Martin and Ryan, p. 73. Martin and Ryan have gathered evidence to show a continuation of the slave trade between the tenth and the eighteenth centuries. While this is indisputable, there is little evidence to show that the scale of the trade was comparable to the two major periods of the slave trade, the seventh to ninth centuries, and the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries. Austen’s attempt to quantify the slave trade is based on inadequate data, and has little virtue other than its provision of a total figure for the East African slave trade of dubious authenticity with which to compare the West African slave trade. See Chapter 2, below, for a fuller discussion of Austen’s figures.
5. Strandes, pp. 89–94; Sheriff (1975a), pp. 17–18.
6. Freeman-Grenville (ed.) (1962a), p. 19.
7. ibid., p. 2.
8. Mathew, p. 96; Chau Ju Kua, p. 130; Wheatley, p. 97; Strandes, p. 90; Garlake, p. 89.
9. Freeman-Grenville (ed.) (1962a), pp. 133–4.
10. Garlake, p. 2; Sheriff (1975a), pp. 15, 19; Strandes, pp. 88–91.
11. Panikkar, p. 13; Strandes, pp. 56–8.
12. Datoo and Sheriff, p. 102; Strandes, pp. 97–8.
13. Strandes, pp. 71–3, 119–26, 39, 45, 106–10.
14. ibid., pp. 114–30; Boxer and Azevedo, p. 28.
15. Strandes, pp. 312, 319.
16. ibid., pp. 228–30; Boxer and Azevedo, pp. 47–8.
17. Strandes, pp. 232, 237–8, 240; Boxer and Azevedo, pp. 50–1, 57–69.
18. Miles, pp. 221, 250; Strandes, p. 291; Alpers (1966), p. 156.
19. Wilkinson (1972), pp. 69, 75–6; Salil, pp. 46, 51, 53, 78, 84; Niebuhr, Vol. 2, p. 113; Halliday, p. 267.
20. Salil, pp. 65, 69, 89, 92, 100; Bathurst (1967), pp. 137, 205–6.
21. Salil, p. 93; Bathurst (1967), pp. 205–6.
22. Salil, pp. 51, 57, 84, 90, 100, 176, 200, 216–18.
23. Bathurst (1972), pp. 103–6.
24. Salil, pp. 152, 202, 342; Wilkinson (1972), pp. 77–8; Kelly (1972), p. 109; Bathurst (1972), pp. 101–2; Phillips (1967), p. 66. Said b. Sultan, however, continued to be referred to, incorrectly, as the Imam in British sources well into the nineteenth century. Nicholls, pp. 22, 101. Frederick Cooper seems to reject this