Buying Time. Thomas F. McDow
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Mobility and the Omani States
ON THE NIGHT OF OCTOBER 25, 1856, a small band of Arab men rowed toward the flickering oil lights of Zanzibar town. They had waited at anchor behind a small island in the channel since late afternoon. During the day, Zanzibar’s shore buzzed with activity. Gangs of laborers unloaded cargo from the African mainland, animal hides, gum copal, and mangrove poles. Merchants supervised ivory shipments while their workers scraped and washed the tusks.1 The Indian customs master and his assistants hovered around the port, eager to collect levies on the shipments arriving from Bombay, Manchester, and Salem. At night, however, the waterfront was quiet. Against a rising storm, the oarsmen pulled the travelers on the final leg of their journey from Arabia. Most likely, the passengers kept silent, due both to their cargo and their errand. Among them were three important men—including one who was anxious to prove his manhood and another who was six days dead.
The corpse was Seyyid Said bin Sultan al-Busaidi, the Omani merchant prince who had brought East Africa under his sway. Said bin Sultan was a contemporary of Napoleon Bonaparte and Mohammed Ali Pasha of Egypt, and, as a British official observed, he was “hardly inferior” to either man, “except in as far as the stage on which he acted was more restricted.”2 This “restricted” stage touched all sides of the western Indian Ocean, and, as hard as it would be to calculate, Seyyid Said probably covered more lifetime miles than either of these other men. After nearly three decades of shuttling between Arabia and the East African coast, to establish himself in East Africa and then to maintain his rule in both places, Seyyid Said bin Sultan died at sea on a return trip to Zanzibar. A unified Omani realm did not survive him. The other men on the ship, including his young son Barghash and the leader of the Harthi confederation in Zanzibar, hoped to bury Seyyid Said quietly and then seize power.3 This proved impossible, and Seyyid Said’s death set off contests for control in Zanzibar and Muscat that lasted fifteen years and reverberated into the twentieth century.
Seyyid Said’s death has become a periodizing marker in the histories of both Oman and East Africa.4 This framing, however, ignores the continuities across the nineteenth century, including the mobility of Arab rulers in Muscat and Zanzibar. This mobility allowed them to buy time when faced with a reconfiguration of power in the Indian Ocean. This chapter examines the remarkable nineteenth-century itineraries of the Busaidi rulers and traces the correlation of mobility and debt to state power. In doing so, it also provides an overview of Oman’s and Zanzibar’s nineteenth-century political history. State power tended to be weak, and travel and mobility reinforced the tentative nature of central authority, especially in an era of encroaching British suzerainty. Mobility as a temporizing strategy allowed sultans and aspirants to make claims on new territories, escape confrontations, and wait out challenges. Mobility and indebtedness also posed challenges to state formation when distance weakened loyalties or credit dried up. Although the first half of the nineteenth century witnessed Omani territorial control at its zenith, this changed dramatically during the second half when circuits of mobility shifted, deracinated rulers became protégés of empire, and state political cultures became increasingly rooted. A formerly unified Indian Ocean realm became two territorial sultanates in 1861, one in Muscat and one in Zanzibar. Greater imperial hegemony and global economic integration produced a hardening of territorial boundaries in the Indian Ocean that challenged older practices of mobility in the region and ultimately undercut Busaidi authority.
This chapter begins with Seyyid Said bin Sultan’s travels on the Indian Ocean, when, in response to constrained opportunities in Arabia, he worked to expand and solidify his domain in Africa. He practiced a form of mobile governance to rule a vast dominion across the western Indian Ocean. As he moved between Arabia and Africa, he bought temporary loyalties with pensions and subsidies. These gave Said bin Sultan flexibility in the short term but did not provide lasting solutions to the unique challenges of a dispersed territory. To maintain mobile governance, Said used thinly veiled hostage-taking and depended increasingly on his own sons as governors. Fraternal rivalries among the younger generation led to exaltations for some and exile for others, ultimately undermining the unity of Said’s dominions. The movements and maneuvers of five of his sons—Hilal, Thuwayni, Turki, Majid, and Barghash—deserve special attention because they illuminate a new geography of power in the western Indian Ocean that included travels to London, and, more importantly, Bombay. Said’s firstborn, Hilal bin Said, traveled to London in the 1840s to appeal to British authorities and to improve his standing in his father’s realm, but he was unsuccessful and died in exile in Arabia. After Seyyid Said’s death in 1856, an unfolding succession dispute among Thuwayni, Turki, Majid and Barghash created an opportunity for British intervention that circumscribed the mobility of the winners and their territorial mobility. The losers—Barghash in Zanzibar, Turki in Muscat—faced temporary exile in Bombay, while Barghash’s allies in his failed 1859 rebellion escaped to the caravan trails of mainland Africa. British arbitration in 1861 led to the Canning Award that formalized the political separation of Muscat and Zanzibar. While the British officially framed the brothers’ rivalry as involving succession and sovereignty, the sons of Said bin Sultan used the language of debt. Between them, the seizure of property became the idiom of power, and their access to credit governed their standing with allies and in the region.
In the second half of the century, Barghash’s exile in Bombay and his partisans’ sojourns in the East Africa interior stretched the boundaries of the western Indian Ocean circuits, which had its poles in Muscat and Zanzibar. Yet the rulers in Zanzibar and Muscat had less space in which to operate. From Zanzibar, Majid (r. 1856–70) moderated his ambitions and reached for the coast of East Africa to found his own modern city at Dar es Salaam, was inspired by a trip to Bombay. Instabilities in Oman in the 1860s illuminated the degree to which three successive regimes were hemmed in territorially and by debt (Thuwayni, r. 1856–66; Salim, r. 1866–68; and a new imamate, 1868–71). Bombay provided refuge for Turki bin Said to wait out the political turmoil in Muscat, and credit from Zanzibar allowed him to choose when to reassert himself in Oman. His story also highlights an underappreciated aspect of mobility: some members of households, especially women and children, were not as mobile in Indian Ocean circuits and suffered for it. In the early 1870s, the more mobile younger brothers, losers of the early succession disputes who each endured exile in Bombay, succeeded at last. Barghash’s reign in Zanzibar (1870–88) and Turki’s in Muscat (1871–88) marked turning points in Arab sovereignty in the western Indian Ocean. While British intervention compromised their authority, their successors would claim even less independence, mobility, and territory.
SAID BIN SULTAN AND MOBILE GOVERNANCE, 1820S TO 1856
Said bin Sultan, whose shrouded corpse had been carried ashore in Zanzibar in 1856, was not an elected imam, but his territorial expansion and his legacy reflected principles of the Ibadi imamate ideal. For Ibadis in Oman, the imamate was the historical and religious ideal of government. Historically, male leaders and religious scholars sought to elect an imam who was righteous and fair. The imam would then make a contract with the electors, who pledged their support.5 Thus in its ideal form, imamate rule depended on personal qualities and on the imam as being first among equals. The Ibadi imamate did not have a fixed capital in Oman, and transferring the capital—between Nizwa, al-Rustaq, Bahla, and other places—became a key aspect of Omani political culture.6 In this way, the imamate’s approach to territoriality also influenced the later Busaidi state.
Said bin Sultan’s rule was also a legacy of contradictory forces within Ibadi politics. While the proscribed pattern of imamate election and rule worked in theory, in practice the imamate tended to revert from elected rule to a pattern of inherited, dynastic rule, at which point electors and religious leaders withdrew their backing. Dynastic rule depended on tribal confederations rather than religious legitimacy, so this imamate cycle, as Wilkinson details, also fed Omani tribal politics and rivalries. The first imam of the Busaidi line was Ahmad bin Said, who had helped rescue Oman from civil war and Persian invasion in the 1740s and was formally elected imam in 1753–54. From Ahmad bin Said’s election up to the present, his heirs have been the rulers of Oman, though two distinct familial lines emerged in the 1780s. At that time, one line eschewed the support of the interior ulema, moved its capital to Muscat, and staked their future on trade in the gulf and the Indian Ocean. These were Said bin Sultan’s direct ancestors,