weakening of Portuguese power in the Indian Ocean permitted this continental theocracy to extend its political control over the coast and to assume a larger role in maritime trade. In a series of wars the Portuguese were forced to surrender their fortified posts one after another, and to permit the Omanis to trade freely in the remaining Portuguese-held ports. In 1650 they were expelled from Muscat, their last stronghold on the Omani coast. Sultan b. Saif (1649–79), the conqueror of Muscat, incurred the odium of the religious party for his worldly activities – he had sent merchants as far as the Red Sea, Iraq, Iran and India to trade on his account – and he had to justify it as part of the holy war ‘to supply the demand of the Mussulmans for horses, arms, etc.’20 His son no longer needed any religious cloak in the pursuit of wealth. These imams, who owed their politico-ideological role to the theocratic constitution, began increasingly to be transformed into merchant princes, diverting part of their profits to date production based on slave labour. The dates were grown on large plantations of 3,000 to 5,000 palms or more, some of which required irrigation and a considerable amount of slave labour. Saif b. Sultan (1692–1711) is said to have owned 1,700 slaves and one-third of all the date palms in Oman, planted 30,000 date and 6,000 coconut palms, and renovated or constructed 17 aflaj. This created a demand for agricultural slaves from East Africa, numbering more than a thousand a year, to produce dates for export. During the first decade of the nineteenth century MT$50,000 worth of dates were exported from the Persian Gulf to Bombay.21
The emergence of this class of merchant capitalists and landowners who employed slave labour began to transform the political economy of Oman. An important indication of this transformation comes from the Arabic chronicle of Oman, Salil b. Razik’s History of the Imams and Seyyids of Oman. Whereas during the seventeenth century he repeatedly refers to ‘nobles and commons’ as the dominant powers in the Omani social formation, which still retained a strong egalitarian element, during the eighteenth century this formula is replaced entirely by a new one, ‘merchants and nobles’, and consistently in that order, indicating the rise of this new class and its dominant influence in the Omani state. Rival groups within the Ya’rubi dynasty offered commercial privileges to the merchants to attract their support.22
The concentration of wealth in the hands of the merchant prince made it incompatible with the Ibadhi politico-religious ideology of an ascetic imam. The growing secularisation and tendency towards temporal power ran counter to the Ibadhi principle of an elected imam. With Saif b. Sultan a ruling dynasty and the principle of patrilineal succession were established. The accession to the imamate of a mere boy who had not even reached the ‘age of discretion’, and who was elected and deposed four times, made a mockery of the Ibadhi principle. Gradually a glaring cleavage between religious authority and temporal power appeared, with the appointment of a series of regents as de facto rulers.23
Omani participation in maritime trade was imposing a great strain on the traditional society. The fabric of the essentially tribal society was unable to incorporate these innovations without a social revolution. During the first half of the eighteenth century Oman consequently went through one of the fiercest civil wars recorded in her annals, a war that contributed to the downfall of the Ya’rubi dynasty. The Busaidi dynasty which replaced it in 1741 was quite frankly mercantile and maritime, drawing its strength from oceanic trade rather than from territorial or spiritual overlordship. The founder, Ahmed b. Said (1744–83), was ‘first and foremost a merchant and shipowner’. As the traveller C. Niebuhr commented, ‘to eke out his scanty revenue, the prince does not disdain to deal himself in trade.’ Under this dynasty the separation between spiritual and temporal authority was completed when the spiritual character of the ruler was quietly renounced. Hamad b. Said (1786–92) did not even care to depose the Imam when he assumed the reins of power. Instead he adopted the title seyyid (lord), to distinguish the ruling family, giving them corporate dignity and pre-eminence over all other chiefs and grandees. Said b. Sultan (1804–56) underscored the irrelevance of the spiritual post by never seeking an election, and instead he adopted the unabashedly secular title, sultan, which signified temporal authority and power. To emphasise the new basis of this political power, Ahmed b. Said had formed a standing army of 1,000 free soldiers, including Baluchi mercenaries, and 1,100 African slaves, rather than rely entirely on the tribal rabble. The seal to this social revolution was set towards the end of the eighteenth century with the shift of the capital from the traditional seat of the imamate at Nazwa in the interior to the metropolitan mercantile seat of the sultanate at Muscat.24
This internal transformation manifested itself in the foreign relations of Oman, economic as well as political. Its character correlated with stages in the internal transformation of Oman. Initially Omani activities abroad were characterised by periodic raiding of Portuguese settlements in India, the Persian Gulf and East Africa. The Omanis weakened Portuguese hegemony over the Indian Ocean but apparently made no systematic attempt at conquest and sustained commercial expansion. In East Africa they encouraged Swahili insurrection against Portuguese domination, and their dhows appeared annually with the monsoons, ostensibly to trade, but not averse to raiding the Portuguese and their local allies.25
While the first stage of the transformation turned Oman into a raiding naval power, the second stage was to convert her into an expansionist commercial power. The character of Omani ventures abroad increasingly began to take the form of sustained commercial expansion and territorial aggrandisement. The long siege of Mombasa from 1696 to 1698, and the establishment of an Omani administration there upon its capture were a clear indication of this change. A large number of armed merchantmen which had taken part in Omani raids reverted to peaceful commerce by the mid-1730s. Their trade, apart from slaves, was in the less ostentatious commodities of the age-old commerce between East Africa and Arabia and the Persian Gulf, such as food grains and mangrove poles. In return they offered dates, dried fish and Muscat cloth. More lucrative, however, was probably the carrying trade in the western Indian Ocean, exchanging African ivory for Indian cloth, and transporting Indian and British manufactured goods to the Persian Gulf. It was during this period that the Omani merchant class is said to have captured the lucrative trade between Gujarat and Iran.26 The long-term prosperity of this class, with the Omani ruler at its head, depended therefore on international trade and on the success it achieved in monopolising sections of this trade. Not only was such dependence on foreign trade compromising the economic integrity of Oman but, as we shall see below, its success in monopolising the trade came to depend on the overall British hegemony that was developing over the Indian Ocean.
Although commercial and diplomatic contacts had earlier been established between Oman and those European powers that were competing for hegemony in the Indian Ocean, it was the spillover of Anglo-French rivalry into Asia that began to undermine the political independence of Oman. Struggle for monopoly over the trade of the East involved concessions from oriental potentates. The chartered East India companies, both British and French, were therefore backed by the political power of the European mercantile nations. Rivalry between them was particularly virulent during the second half of the eighteenth century, partly because of the disintegration of the Mughal empire which exposed the naked struggle for political control in India and the Indian Ocean. For Britain, which had emerged as the dominant power in India, the defence of its empire and its arteries of trade became a constant preoccupation. Two of these arteries were the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, and for both of these Muscat was a regular port of call. For the French Muscat was strategically located: in wartime it was a potential base for overland attack on British India by way of Egypt and as a base to attack British trade routes from Bombay, in peacetime it could be used to undercut British trade pursuing the longer route round the Cape of Good Hope. Thus in January 1799, Napoleon wrote from Cairo to the ruler of Oman that ‘as you have always been friendly you must be convinced of our desire to protect all the merchant vessels you may send to Suez.’27
However, the British had already struck the preceding October with a treaty whch has been described as ‘a decisively pro-British’ and ‘virtually unilateral treaty.’ The Sultan of Oman bound himself not to allow the French or their Dutch allies to have an establishment in his territories, while the British obtained
