Buying Time. Thomas F. McDow
Читать онлайн книгу.
itself at al-Rustaq in the interior and enjoyed more support from Ibadi scholars.7
As in the imamate ideal, the Busaidi sultans were not all powerful rulers, but their personal qualities helped forge allegiances and loyalties. One way sultans demonstrated the power of their personalistic rule was in settling disputes—and enforcing settlements—between factions. For the rulers’ own rivals, however, coopting them by providing access to income from trade or to credit became a way to ensure fealty, although these allegiance were usually temporary. Indeed, one aspect of statecraft that was vital to the mobile governance of the nineteenth century was offering subsidies or pensions to rivals.
Said bin Sultan employed techniques of mobile governance throughout his reign to consolidate state power and unify dispersed territorial holdings in the gulf, Arabia, and East Africa. In order to take over the Swahili coast and subdue his rivals in Mombasa, he made three separate journeys to East Africa between 1828 and 1837. He relied on local allies, superior naval power, and some old-fashioned chicanery to defeat the Mazrui in Mombasa and to take the fort there in 1837. This victory allowed him to encourage trade on the East African coast and to move his court to Zanzibar. His absences from Oman, however, brought challenges to his rule from rivals and tribal coalitions.
He countered these challenges by offering trade perks and stipends. When these failed, he resorted to hostage taking, essentially making his rivals mobile, too. To the first case, the Yal Sa‘d tribe in Oman were frequent dissenters, and to win their favor Said bin Sultan granted them tax-free exportation privileges for their dates and other goods. Other tribal leaders received healthy annual payments to ensure their loyalty. In East Africa, Said bin Sultan faced recalcitrant governors and established Arab families. One solution to this problem was to insist that certain tribal leaders, such as Salim bin Abdullah, the senior al-Harthi man from Zanzibar, always traveled with him. He handled prominent Ibadi leaders in a similar way. Nasir b. Abi Nabhan al-Kharusi, a well-known Ibadi scholar feared and admired for his ability to make talismans, accompanied Said to Zanzibar.8 Said thus kept powerful rivals close at hand even while on the move.
At the center of the essentially weak state structures was a ruler who depended on personal politics. Maintaining a semblance of control over such a large realm required frequent movement back and forth, and this evolved into a form of mobile governance that held together a dominion that touched three coasts of the western Indian Ocean: eastern Arabia; the port of Bandar Abbas in the gulf; the port and area surrounding Gwadar on the Arabian Sea (in what is now western Pakistan); and Zanzibar and some important towns along the Swahili coast.
While Said bin Sultan’s move to Zanzibar in 1832 shared continuities with Omani patterns of rule, it became an essential shift in the history of the western Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century. This relocation precipitated the process of incorporating the East African interior into the Indian Ocean world. Fundamentally, the move to Zanzibar allowed Said to buy time when faced with a rapidly shifting set of regional relations and uncertain outcomes in the context of a renewed European presence. Arabs had for millennia gone to East Africa for trade, and Indian Ocean monsoon winds facilitated their travel. The Omanis had successfully expelled Portuguese interlopers during the seventeenth century and enjoyed hegemony in the western Indian Ocean. The situation changed in the nineteenth century when, in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, the British began to assert themselves into trade dealings in the Persian Gulf and in the Indian Ocean. These maneuvers were tied broadly to Britain’s growing interest in India, and led to an allegiance with Said bin Sultan to quash “piracy” in the gulf in the 1810s. Britain made truces with the sheikdoms of Abu Dhabi, Ras al-Khayma, and others on the southern coast of the gulf in 1820 and in so doing severely limited Said bin Sultan’s and his subjects’ activity in the region. At the same time, Omani traders faced stricter scrutiny in Bombay.9 In response to setbacks in the gulf and in Bombay, Said bin Sultan took an active approach to East Africa, using his naval power and allegiances with Omani Arab families in the region when he could. This set of moves established outposts of the Omani state astride the Swahili coast and regional maritime networks. The historian M. Reda Bhacker makes clear that the pull factors in Zanzibar—a secure island that promised economic growth and had close relations with Indian traders—were partial solutions to Said bin Sultan’s “need to survive” British moves in the Indian Ocean, and served to delay any confrontation.10 Said bin Sultan’s temporizing moves paid off with the early commercial success of Zanzibar, but maintaining his rule relied on his mobility.
Said bin Sultan traveled between East Africa and Arabia to settle disputes, to protect his interests, and to ensure his rule would continue. He initially relied on slave governors or appointed governors from prominent local families but eventually began to appoint his sons as governors in key port cities. His oldest son, Hilal bin Said, was the wali (governor) of Barka, on the Batinah coast, in the late 1830s, and another son, Thuwayni bin Said was the governor of Muscat from this period.11 When Thuwayni bin Said captured the port city of Suhar in 1851 from the rival branch of the Busaidi, Said appointed another son, Turki bin Said, as its governor. The expelled governor, Qays bin Azzan bin Qays, and his followers moved to al-Rustaq, the interior stronghold of their line. Said bin Sultan needed loyal sons as governors while he moved back and forth to maintain control. Indeed, after Said had settled affairs at Suhar, he returned to Zanzibar in 1852 and then left once again for Muscat in 1854 to address Wahhabi encroachment and a dispute with the Persians at Bandar Abbas.
The characteristics of Said’s mobile governance are evident during the period when he concluded trade agreements with foreign powers. He signed a commercial treaty with the Americans in 1833, and they enjoyed great influence in Zanzibar. Said bin Sultan hoped that his relationship with them would led to a steam-powered ship for him. This cutting edge technology would allow him to defy the monsoon winds and move back and forth more easily. In December 1839, rumors flew that the US Government was going to give Said bin Sultan a steamship in exchange for access to one of the mainland trading towns.12 This trade never came to pass, and Said would not acquire his first steamship for more than a decade.13 In 1840, shortly after Said bin Sultan concluded a similar commercial treaty with Britain, the British appointed a consul to oversee their interests. Fittingly, the new agent, Atkins Hamerton, was not assigned to a specific place, but to the ruler, so he, too, moved between Zanzibar and Oman in the 1840s and 1850s.
All told, Said bin Sultan ruled for nearly fifty years (1806–56) and was present in East Africa for nearly one-third of this. The proportion was much higher in the second half of his tenure. Between January 1828 and his death in October 1856, Said spent more than 80 percent of his time in East Africa (211 of 345 months).14 He had also spent many months at sea, and perhaps it is fitting that he died at sea in October 1856 en route from Muscat to Zanzibar. It was then that Barghash tried to bury his father surreptitiously and seize power from his brother Majid. Said bin Sultan’s reliance on his sons was an aspect of mobile governance that held his dominions together during his lifetime, but it also fostered a rivalry between his sons. These rivalries fractured their father’s carefully nurtured realm and delineated new circuits of mobility in the Indian Ocean.
MOBILITY TO SEEK NEW SUPPORT FOR POWER, 1844 TO 1851
While Said bin Sultan was still alive, his sons had already begun to jockey for position, and their actions demonstrated both the shortcomings of Said’s system of mobile governance and the importance of credit for Arab rulers. Said bin Sultan’s governors had been allies, near relatives, and trusted slaves earlier in his rule. As his own sons became old enough, however, he began appointing them as governors. His first son’s rise and dramatic fall from grace revealed the shifting contours of power emerging in the Indian Ocean during this period. Hilal bin Said had received foreign visitors in the palace in Muscat and served as the governor of Barka (c. 1838–41) in Oman before his father lost faith in him and recalled him to Zanzibar in 1841.15 In 1844, Atkins Hamerton called Hilal “the most shrewd and energetic of all the Imam’s sons,” and he noted that Hilal had “the sympathy and good view of all His Highness’s Arab subjects . . . and [was] loved by the tribes of Oman.”16 Said did not feel the same affection. Some attributed Hilal’s downfall to the fact that his mother, an Abyssinian, had died when he was a child so he had no advocate for him in household politics. In contrast, Khalid, Hilal’s