Omanis had thus abandoned their long-standing veto against foreign factories on Omani soil. During the war, moreover, the Sultan bound himself not to allow the French to enter the inner cove of Muscat to water, but to anchor outside, and the Omanis agreed to take part with the English in any naval engagement against the French in Omani waters, though not on the high seas. It was stipulated that ‘the friend of that Sirkar [the East India Company] is the friend of this [Oman]; and in the same way the enemy of this is to be enemy of that.’ The Omani state had thus been induced to surrender its neutrality, at least on paper, and to recognise its subordinate position vis-à-vis Britain. What were all these concessions for? As Captain John Malcolm, who renegotiated and extended this treaty in 1800, put it to the Omani governor:
What . . . was to become of the famed commerce of Muscat if the harbours of the whole Indian peninsula were to be closed against the merchant-ships of Muscat by the fiat of the paramount power?28
The independence of Oman had been sacrified at the altar of commercial profit. The compradorial character of the Omani state had been confirmed.
However, the collapse of Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition in 1799 reduced the threat to British India, and many of the concessions wrung from Oman in these treaties were not immediately taken up. Instead, Oman was allowed to assume ‘neutrality’ during the Anglo-French war so that British trade could continue to flow. Omani shipping was considerably augmented by the purchase of English prize ships at French ports. British Indian ships, which could not be protected by the overstretched navy, adopted the neutral flag of Oman. Two of the best Surat vessels formerly employed in the trade with the Persian Gulf passed into the hands of Muscat Arabs, and one prominent shipowner of Surat held 2,000 tons of shipping at Muscat. It was reported in 1803–4 that Omani Arabs, ‘in the course of ten years have increased their tonnage from a number of Dows and Dingeys, and two or three old ships, to upwards of fifty five ships’ with a total displacement of between 40,000 and 50,000 tons. Some European merchants at Bombay reported that ‘the present shipping of the subjects of the Imam including domiciled Arabs of our own settlements, exceeds the British tonnage of this port.’ With this augmented shipping the Arabs had become not only ‘the carriers of that part of India which lay between the eastern shores of the Bay of Bengal and the western extremities’ of the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, but also controlled the carrying trade between Indian ports, and threatened to capture the lucrative China trade. At the height of the boom about five-eighths of the whole Persian Gulf trade passed through Muscat. Apart from neutrality the reason advanced for this Omani success was their great competitiveness in freight charges, for it was claimed that they could carry freight at a price between a half and oné-third of what a British ship could.29
The lamentations of British shipping capital in India, harking back to the monopolistic Navigation Laws of yesteryear, received scant attention from the representatives of British industrial capital at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The neutral flag of Oman not only provided protection from French raids but also lowered transportation costs for British commodities. And for all these services the Omani compradorial state demanded only 5 per cent import duty, and even less if Muslim or Arab agents were used.30
However, this commercial boom at Muscat, especially between 1798 and 1806, was based on the shifting sands of Anglo-French warfare over which the Omani merchants could have had no control. While the war lasted the Sultan’s exchequer prospered with an annual revenue of MT$112,500 from import duties alone. The merchant class at Muscat flourished, ‘some of them possessing capitals of a million dollars.’ But with peace came a massive desertion of the Omani flag by Indian vessels and the drying up of the sources of cheap English prizes. By 1817 the old ships had begun to decay. The balloon had burst. The restless merchant prince was again in search of new commercial monopolies, new niches in what had become a British lake.31
One of these niches was the Persian Gulf where maritime Arabs on both the Arabian and Iranian sides, poorly endowed with means of livelihood, had been supplementing their incomes with an active role in commerce from time immemorial. By the late eighteenth century these Arabs, under the leadership of the Qawasima, had begun to challenge Oman’s commercial dominance in the western Indian Ocean. The ruler of Oman, on the other hand, sought to enhance Omani dominance over the Gulf, aiming ‘to create a tightly controlled maritime state’ embracing both shores of the Gulf of Oman, the major Persian Gulf islands and the Arab coast, and to make Muscat the sole distribution centre for goods from abroad. This maritime commercial rivalry ran parallel to the struggle on land between the expanding Wahhabi power of Saudi Arabia and the Omani sultanate.32
British government policy towards these struggles astride one of the major arteries of trade was governed by its position in India. For the British the Persian Gulf was an area which had to be kept open for their commerce and free of any power which could threaten their empire in India. As regards the strictly commercial rivalry between the Omani merchant class and the Qawasima, the British government was not particularly interested in underwriting Omani monopoly any more than it had been to support British shipping capital. In fact the Secretary to the Government of Bombay argued that it was the Omani drive to monopolise the trade that was primarily responsible for maritime warfare in the Persian Gulf, and that this had given a stimulus to piracy and had endangered British trade. Thus, when in 1804 the ruler of Oman called on the British to help him sweep the Gulf clear of the Qawasima, Bombay turned a deaf ear, and he paid with his dear life in the unsuccessful campaign that he conducted unilaterally. The British studiously avoided hostilities with the Qawasima unless they were fired on first, and when they did get embroiled in the conflict in 1806, they quickly concluded a treaty that, among other things, made a provision allowing the Qawasima to frequent British Indian ports directly. In 1809, when they were again involved in military action against the Qawasima, a conflict that led to the destruction of a large portion of the Qawasima merchant fleet, the British tried a temporary ban on timber exports to the Gulf from India. However, since the object of the expedition had been to safeguard and not destroy commerce, the ban was not enforced for long.33
Nevertheless, the British government’s concern for the security of India meant that it was vitally interested in the ‘independence’ of Oman from either French or Wahhabi control, and in her dependence on Britain. The Governor General of India wrote that the independence of Oman was important in Britain’s interests for political and economic reasons, and since the Qawasima had allied with the Wahhabis, ‘the preservation of that independence appears to turn upon the cooperation of the British power against the Joasmee [Qawasima] pirates.’ An additional consideration was the need to counteract the influence of the French, who had signed a commercial treaty with Oman in 1807. While the British government refused to accept the Sultan’s interpretation of the Anglo-Omani treaties as amounting to an offensive and defensive alliance, it was nevertheless prepared to underwrite the survival of its surrogate to ensure British dominance over the area. Between 1806 and 1820 the British, with the ready cooperation of their junior partner, the Omanis, attacked the Qawasima three times, finally breaking the backbone of their resistance against the Omanis and their British overlords. The subordinate role played by the Omani forces in all these engagements further confirmed the depths to which the Omani state had sunk by 1820. The General Treaty of Peace with what were called the Trucial States concluded at the end of these hostilities excluded all reference to the Omani role in the Persian Gulf.34 The British had finally decided to come out from behind the Omani veil.
The subjugation of the Swahili coast
Oman was a monsoon-using alien power dependent on easy communication with the homeland. With the fragmented commercial economy of the Swahili coast, and with each city-state controlling its own narrow hinterland as well as sharing in the coastal trade, the Omanis needed control over strategic points along the coast to dominate its trade. Mombasa appeared to be an ideal headquarters, with the impregnable Fort Jesus and a secure harbour dominating the northern approaches to the coast. It was in fact the first seat of Omani governorship. However, the spillover of the Omani social revolution to East Africa was to deprive the new Busaidi dynasty of control over
