in the 1820s and 1830s, Said subdued the towns of the Swahili coast.
Seyyid Said was a ruler of international standing. He corresponded with Muhammad Ali, the pasha of Egypt, and Andrew Jackson, the president of the United States. He finalized commercial treaties with the United States, Britain, and France. In 1846, he sent his most trusted ambassador to New York City with a cargo of merchandise. In the Indian Ocean region, he sought strategic marriages with regional powers, taking a Persian royal for a bride, and he sent proposals to the widowed Sakalava Queen of western Madagascar.32 In Oman, he leveraged his power to check challenges on religious grounds, both from Omani Ibadis and from reformist Wahhabis outside his realm. In the Persian Gulf he battled other regional maritime powers and allied with Great Britain to suppress piracy.33 After 1819, when Great Britain effectively limited the Omani role in the Persian Gulf trade and threatened the robust exchange between Muscat and the ports of western India, Said looked to Africa.34
The relationship between eastern Arabia and East Africa was an enduring one. People from Arabia had settled on the east coast for more than a millennium, and slaves from the Swahili coast revolted in southern Iraq in the tenth century.35 Monsoon winds propelled seasonal traders to Africa and back, and other Arab migrants established themselves on the Swahili coast in medieval city-states like Kilwa.36 Direct Omani involvement in East Africa began after the Omani Arabs wrested the coast from the Portuguese in 1698. This involvement in East African affairs waxed and waned over the next two hundred years, dictated as much by politics in Arabia as by matters on the coast. Under the eighteenth-century Omani Ya’arubi dynasty, more Arabs had settled along the East African coast—especially from Lamu to Mombasa, and further south at Kilwa—as they were attracted by profits from trade. These settlers retained their loyalty to the Ya’arubi rulers even after the 1740s, when Imam Ahmad displaced them in Oman. During that period, Imam Ahmad tried to capture Mombasa, and he sent assassins from Oman to eliminate certain rulers, but he was unsuccessful.37 It was tenacious Arab clans like these, foremost among them the Mazrui of Mombasa, that Said bin Sultan faced in the early nineteenth century when he attempted to assert al-Busaidi control over the coast.
Said had begun his conquest of East Africa in 1817, and he tried to balance Arab and European rivalries in the Persian Gulf and on the African coast, along with a tenuous domestic situation in the Omani interior. Once he secured Zanzibar, an island situated twenty miles from shore in the middle of the long Swahili coast, Seyyid Said used it as a base of operations. Some East African outposts, especially Mombasa, did not readily submit to al-Busaidi rule. Elsewhere on the Swahili coast by the late 1820s, Said had established effective control over important coastal towns, appointing a governor, a customs master, and in some cases, a garrison chief. Zanzibar was the most important for Said bin Sultan, and he moved his court from Muscat to Zanzibar in 1832. With this direct attention (and substantial intrigue), he was able to subdue the Swahili coast and exile the Mazrui governor of Mombasa and his followers to the Persian Gulf in 1837.38
Despite his nominal control of both Arabia and East Africa, Said bin Sultan faced challenges to his rule from his subjects and from European political interests in the western Indian Ocean. In Arabia, he favored the coastal towns like Muscat, Muttrah, and Suhar, over the interior centers of Ibadi power, such as Nizwa and al-Rustaq. During his reign, Said bin Sultan failed to earn the confidence of Ibadi leaders, and he sought to balance their needs with the demands and attractions of Indian Ocean (and global) trade.39 The Busaidis had aggressively pursued international trade since 1783, focusing more on Muscat and port cities than the interior. By moving their capital from al-Rustaq to Muscat in the eighteenth century, al-Busaidi rulers distanced themselves from the tribal politics of the interior.40 Consequently, Muscat and its sister city Muttrah became vibrant, multicultural ports, attracting merchants, traders, and slaves from the Persian Gulf and the western Indian Ocean. A visitor in 1824 noted Muscat had become “a sort of emporium for the Coasts of Africa, Madagascar, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and India in general; and in being so, it has rather added to than diminished the trade of Cutch, Surat, Bombay, &c.”41 The strong connection to India was clear: this observer noted that the lingua franca of Muscat was Hindustani, and the only Arabic speakers were native Arabs, whom he called “by far the smallest portion of the inhabitants.” 42
Within Arabia, Said had to contend with the threat of Wahhabi pressure. The violent, reformist ideology that Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab expounded in the eighteenth century became the theological basis for the expansion of Muhammad bin Sa’ud’s state from highland central Arabia. The Wahhabi antagonized the Ottomans to their north and the Omanis to their east.
Said bin Sultan’s challenges in Arabia from the Wahhabi forces demonstrated the complex calculus of local and regional rivals. Between 1800 and 1820, the area around Wadi Ma‘awil was home to a series of violent destructive conflicts. The Wahhabi attacks on the well-watered date-farming region at the southern end of the Batinah coast and the areas northwest of Muscat and near Wadi Sumayl were retribution for Said bin Sultan’s activity in the gulf. Said bin Sultan had allied with the East India Company in 1809 to thwart his rivals the Qawasim of Ras al-Khayma and their Wahhabi allies.43 When the East India Company’s ships withdrew, however, the Wahhabi staged multiple punitive expeditions against Oman, and the Wadi Ma‘awil was hit hard. In response to the Wahhabi alliance with Said’s local rivals, the Omani ruler requested military support from the Persian shah and received 1,500 cavalrymen.44 Some of the pitched battles lasted nearly two weeks. Foreign troops occupied local settlements, and fighting spilled into the marketplace.45 Both sides destroyed their enemies’ date plantations, cutting down trees in contravention of Ibadi laws of war, and crushing the local agricultural economy.46 Seyyid Said failed to bring peace when he captured the fort at Nakhl, because the governor he appointed abused the local populace. They insisted that the governor be removed or they would emigrate, but the replacement was also cruel.47 Even as Said bin Sultan launched attacks on Bahrain in the gulf, the war in Wadi al-Ma‘awīl continued until the late 1810s when, after sending a large contingent from Sharqiya, Said bin Sultan negotiated a temporary settlement in the region.48 The fight with the Wahhabi and their allies threatened Said bin Sultan’s rule and destabilized the local population. These rivalries also pushed Said bin Sultan to ally frequently with British forces, and he spent much of his career negotiating with Europeans in the Indian Ocean.
As with domestic forces, Said engaged in a subtle balancing act with European nations, and his move to Africa brought him into closer contact with them. He sought trading advantages through commercial treaties, but he tried to limit the role of European traders, especially in his African dependencies. For much of his reign, Europeans were forbidden from trading on the African mainland. He funneled all business through Zanzibar. There, Indian merchants and financiers, some of whom had followed him from Muscat (where their families had lived for generations), oversaw trade on behalf of Said, and they imposed customs duties on all goods. In Oman, foreign merchants were limited to the port cities. In the 1840s, British traders desired direct access to the products of the African mainland, and their government wanted to curtail the slave trade. Said bin Sultan signed treaties in 1822 and 1845 to limit the trade of slaves within his dominion. Although these treaties only applied to European subjects and did not prohibit Said’s subjects from keeping, selling, or transporting slaves within East Africa, the measures were not popular in Said’s African territories. European observers noted the limited strength of the Zanzibari state and its inability to control Africa beyond its primary trading ports.
Said had been forced to balance these interests and strategize among their connections to maintain his precarious command of these far-flung realms. To maintain his interests, he often needed to be present in Arabia or Africa, and even after he had moved his court to Zanzibar in 1832, events in Oman or the Persian Gulf frequently beckoned him north. Such absences, dependent on the twice-yearly monsoon winds to facilitate his voyage, could easily stretch over a year. Seyyid Said’s rule thus relied upon loyal governors, mercenaries, and tax collectors. When Said traveled, he did so warily, sometimes insisting that rivals from tribal factions, prominent families, or learned
