Читать книгу Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar - Abdul Sheriff - Страница 17
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The Rise of a Compradorial State
The East African coast was a part of the commercial system in the Indian Ocean for at least two thousand years. But its role in that system for most of that period was largely that of an intermediate zone of exchange between various producing and consuming zones around the ocean. Commerce, rather than production, formed the basis of the civilisation that flourished there. It was cosmopolitan and urbane; it was prosperous but compradorial. The coast was a zone of interaction between two cultural streams, one coming from the African interior and one from across the Indian Ocean, from which emerged a synthesis, the Swahili1 civilisation, that at every step betrays its dual parentage. But that civilisation was mercantile. It gave rise to city-states that were like beads in a rosary, each forming a distinct entity, and yet threaded together by maritime communication and a common culture and language. Their mercantile ruling classes prospered from the middleman’s profit which they cornered. They were utterly dependent on international trade, with no control over either the producing or consuming ends. The rhythm of Swahili coastal history was not internally generated but was synchronised with the wider rhythm of international trade in the Indian Ocean, and of some of the dominant social formations in that system.
The East African coast forms a fairly distinct geographical entity, bounded on the west by a belt of poor, low-rainfall scrub known in Kiswahili as the nyika (wilderness). The nyika runs just behind the narrow coastal belt in Kenya. Further south, it is more broken, being penetrated by the eastern rim of mountains and by river valleys which form corridors into the interior. The nyika recedes further into the interior, virtually disappearing in southern mainland Tanzania. The character of the narrow coastal belt, especially in the north, meant that it failed to provide an adequate productive base for many of the city-states, some of which were confined to offshore islands. Moving from north to south, however, there is a progressive enlargement of the immediate hinterland, and the potential for production and trade. On the other hand, the nyika imposed not so much an absolute barrier as a premium on the costs of communication between the coast and the interior, a price that could be paid only at certain times and places in the history of East Africa.
Map 1.1 The western Indian Ocean
The sea defines the eastern border of the coastal belt, but it is the end of the world only to an incorrigible landsman. To coastal people it is an arena of production, an avenue of communication, a zone of commercial contact and cultural interaction. Such interaction, of course, presupposed the development of a suitable technology which included not only marine engineering but also the harnessing of the winds and the currents. In the Indian Ocean this meant, above all, the monsoons. They are marked by a seasonal reversal of winds showing great regularity, forming a highly dynamic system of which the East African coast forms only a fringe. The north-east monsoon begins to build up from November when it covers the western Indian Ocean as far south as Mogadishu. The winds are steady and light, and they permit the departure of the early dhows from the Arabian coast, taking thirty to forty days to reach their destinations in East Africa. With a greater frequency of tropical storms in the eastern half of the Arabian Sea in October and November, suitable sailing conditions from India occur in December. By then the monsoon is well established as far south as Zanzibar, allowing for a faster and more direct voyage taking twenty to twenty-five days. This pattern of circulation is reinforced by the equatorial current which flows southwards after striking the Somali coast, thus facilitating the voyage from the north. But since the African coast is at the fringe of the monsoon system, the constancy of the monsoon decreases dramatically as it encounters the south-easterlies blowing towards Mozambique. The convergence of the two wind systems creates a region of variable winds and unstable weather prone to tropical cyclones in the Mozambique channel, making the voyage both arduous and dangerous south of Cape Delgado.2
By March the north-east monsoon begins to break up, and it does so earliest in the south. By April the wind has reversed to become the southwest monsoon. The equatorial current at this time strikes the coast near Cape Delgado and splits into the strong north-flowing current which facilitates the northward journey, and the south-flowing current which hinders exit to the north from the Mozambique channel. This is the season of departure from East Africa, but there is an interruption between mid-May and mid-August when the weather is too boisterous for Indian Ocean shipping. Dhows therefore sail either with the build-up (Musim) of the monsoon in April, if commercial transactions can be completed in time, or with the tail-end (Demani) in August. The latter strategy becomes increasingly necessary if dhows have to proceed south of Zanzibar.
Map 1.2 The monsoons
The spatial extent and the differential pattern of the monsoons thus helped define the normal radius of action of Indian Ocean dhows. They tended to favour the northern part of the East African coast which enjoyed a longer trading season between the two monsoons, especially for Indian dhows. The southern coast, on the other hand, is at the extreme periphery of the monsoon system, and it thus experienced a shorter trading season, forcing dhows to ‘winter’ in East African waters and sail back with the tailend of the south-west monsoon in August or September. This required a more elaborate entrepôt system for effective exploitation of the commercial resources of the southern coast, especially that beyond Cape Delgado.
On the one hand, therefore, the narrow coastal belt failed to provide an adequate productive base for the economies of the city-states. They were thus dependent on the transit trade between the African interior and the regions beyond the Indian Ocean. On the other hand, the longitudinal alignment of the coast accessible to the monsoon, even if access was differential, provided the various ports with potentially independent commercial bases. This imprinted on the coastal economy and politics a generally acephalous and even fissiparous tendency, and a spirit of political independence despite, or because of, the individual economic dependence of the city-states on international trade.
The mercantile civilisation of the Swahili coast
From the beginning of the Christian era African social formations along the East African coast, which were initially geared to production of use values for direct consumption or barter, were induced by international trade to produce surplus products for exchange. A surplus of food grains and mangrove poles was exported to the food- and timber-deficient south Arabian coast and the Persian Gulf at various times, though these mundane staples are hardly ever mentioned in the few available sources before the sixteenth century. External demand, however, also induced the production of certain luxuries for which there was probably no local use. While new sources of wealth were thus opened up, they may have entailed the diversion of labour from other essential economic activities. Early Greek and Roman demand for ivory induced south Arabian traders to extend their commercial activities down the East African coast as early as the second century BC. After the collapse of the Roman empire its place was taken by India and China which remained the main markets until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Gold was procurable in sufficient quantities only from Zimbabwe. As demand in Asia increased at the beginning of the second millennium AD, greater amounts of labour, including that of young females, were mobilised to mine gold. Coastal shipping was extended south from Kilwa to Sofala where it met the land routes from Zimbabwe. The medieval glory of Kilwa was directly dependent on this entrepôt trade.3
International trade induced not only the diversion of labour from one economic activity to another within the same social formation but, at various times, even the physical transfer of that labour. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, which was probably written in the late first or early second century AD, mentions the export of slaves, but only from the Horn of Africa. From the seventh to the ninth century, however, there was a massive demand for slave labour to reclaim the marshlands of southern Iraq. Severe exploitation and oppression of a large number of slaves concentrated near Basra led to a series of slave revolts from the end of the seventh century, and culminated in the famous ‘Zanji rebellion’ in the ninth century when the rebels controlled southern Iraq for fourteen years (868–83). The revolt was suppressed but, by their resistance, the slaves had ensured the failure of one of the few cases of agricultural exploitation based on slave labour in Muslim history. The subsequent economic decline of the Middle East meant that the slave trade did not again attain such massive proportions until the eighteenth century.4
In return for African products merchant capital made available to the East African social formations manufactured goods and luxuries which helped expand the sphere of circulation. During the first century AD, imports included metal tools and weapons, but also wine and wheat ‘to gain the goodwill of the barbarians’. By the thirteenth century they included beads, Chinese porcelain and cloth, part of which was consumed by the affluent merchant classes in the city-states themselves. Such imports may at times have offered stiff competition to local bead and textile industries. These industries, which apparently flourished at Mogadishu, Pate, Kilwa and elsewhere, showed signs of decline, although at Kilwa they were killed only with the coming of the Portuguese.5
While merchant capital thus helped to expand the production and circulation of commodities, it may also have helped to impart to East African economic structures a certain lopsided character, with overdeveloped commercial, mining and hunting sectors, and a more stunted industrial sector. Moreover, international trade appears to have been conducted on the initiative of foreign traders to supply the needs of their own homelands, and generally in their own ships. As late as the eleventh century, al-Idrisi commented that ‘the Zanj have no ships to voyage in, but use vessels from Oman and other countries’.6 This suggests inequality in the level of technological and socio-economic development between the trading partners. Under these circumstances there may have been an imposition of a pattern of development on the East African social formations that made them dependent on international trade, and that was more beneficial to the more developed social formations across the ocean. This tendency, however, should not be exaggerated for the period before the rise of capitalism since commodity production, largely of luxuries, played only a limited role in total production.
International trade stimulated the growth of market towns, some of which may have been initially established by the indigenous people themselves. In these market towns trade provided a base for the emergence of a ruling merchant class which appropriated its middleman’s profit from commodities passing through its hands. It ruled over a coastal population that was no longer undifferentiated. In the first century AD the Periplus talks of ‘men of the greatest stature, who are pirates, inhabit the whole coast and at each place have set up chiefs’.7 Commerce may have begun to undermine the tribal constitution, paving the way for the emergence of a class society and a state. By the second century, Ptolemy talks of Rhapta, one of the market towns, as a ‘metropolis’, which Gervase Mathew suggests meant the capital of a state. A thirteenth-century Chinese source describes a stratified society along the coast consisting of the ‘bareheaded and barefooted’ commoners who lived in ‘huts made of palm leaves’, and a ruling class whose stone habitations are alone visible among the coastal ruins today. The populations of some of these city-states are said to have numbered several thousand, and yet none of the ruined cities seem to have more than about fifty stone-built houses.8
In these coastal city-states flourished a civilisation which was prosperous but not self-reliant. The cultural level attained surprised the early European visitors, one of whom was moved to compare the mosque at Kilwa with that at Cordova. A modern archaeologist has been impressed by ‘the complexity, luxury, variety and sensitivity’ of design of the Husuni Kubwa palace at Kilwa. The merchant class, according to the early sixteenth-century Portuguese factor, Duarte Barbosa, exhibited great opulence and luxury:
The kings of these isles [Pemba, Mafia and Unguja] live in great luxury; they are clad in very fine silk and cotton garments, which they purchase at Mombaca from the Cambaya merchants. The women of these Moors go bravely decked, they wear many jewels of fine Çofala gold, silver too in plenty, earrings, necklaces, bangles, and bracelets, and they go clad in good silk garments.9
But that civilisation was mercantile and dependent, as evidenced by the storage rooms which backed the Husuni Kubwa palace. Its dependence on the international connection was not confined to the economy, but permeated the whole range of cultural and social life of the Swahili city-states. Religion and the fundamental bases of culture generally came from abroad, though they were gradually indigenised. The standing architecture appeared on the coast ‘fully fledged’ in the earliest known buildings, and thereafter, according to Peter Garlake, only ‘a slow deterioration in the standards of workmanship is discernible’. This occurs not only when cultural links with the motherland weaken, but also when commercial connections are strengthened, permitting new imports to extinguish some indigenous workmanship. Thus increased imports of Chinese porcelain began to replace the exquisitely carved coral decorations on mosques and tombs. The reliance of the coast on the international connection was so complete that when the Portuguese cut the economic lifelines across the ocean, the mercantile civilisation suffered a major setback. Some of the most prosperous city-states, such as Kilwa, never recovered their medieval glory.10
Portuguese intervention
In 1497 the Portuguese inaugurated what K.M. Pannikar has described as ‘the Vasco da Gama epoch of history’. It was characterised, first, by the ruthless destruction of the pre-existing system of international trade in the Indian Ocean and its forcible integration into the emerging international economic system dominated by Europe, then in transition from feudalism to capitalism. It was also characterised by the dominance of maritime power over the land masses of Asia, and by the imposition of a foreign commercial economy over social formations originally mainly based on agricultural production and internal trade. In their crusade, ‘commerce and Christianity’ were closely intertwined, the former providing the material motivation, the latter the ideological justification. Royal instructions to Portuguese captains enjoined them ‘to conduct war with the Muslim and trade with the heathen’. Should the infidels prove unwilling either to be converted or to engage in trade, then the spiritual weapon of the cross was to be augmented by the carnal weapon of the sword.11
The Portuguese objective was to capture the Indian Ocean trade and divert it from its traditional paths across western Asia to their own maritime artery round the Cape of Good Hope, thus outflanking the Italian-Muslim monopoly over the spice trade. Their geopolitical strategy involved the blocking of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf by capturing Aden and Hurmuz, the capture of Malacca and Goa to control and centralise the Far Eastern and Indian trade, and the establishment of a provisioning station at Mozambique. The threatened interests of Venice, Egypt and the Indian Ocean merchant classes combined to thwart Portuguese designs commercially, by attempting to deny them access to spices, and militarily, by trying to defeat Portuguese naval power. The latter strategy failed at Diu in 1509, but the Portuguese, with their limited human and financial resources, failed to supplant the preexisting system in the Indian Ocean completely.
Along the East African coast, the maritime and mercantile Swahili city-states were vulnerable. Their economic and political foundations were based on the transit trade. By the end of the fifteenth century the coastal mercantile economy was bifocal, dominated in the north by Mombasa as the most convenient port for the northern, especially Indian, dhows and in the south by Kilwa which controlled the gold trade from Sofala; and there was considerable collaboration between the two.12 But the Swahili merchant class was fragmented, both between and within the competing city-states. This provided the Portuguese intruders with a golden opportunity to divide and rule, allying with the weaker puppet sections to subjugate Mombasa. Despite valiant resistance, the power of Mombasa was broken, and the town was twice razed to the ground, in 1505 and 1528. In the south the Portuguese took advantage of the cleavage within the ruling merchant class in Kilwa to impose a puppet regime in 1505. A couple of years previously they had severed its southern lifeline by establishing a factory at Sofala. Under this double blow Kilwa declined precipitously, never to recover its medieval glory.13
Although the power of the Swahili merchant class was broken, the Portuguese lacked the resources for effective control of the whole coast and monopoly of trade. Their power north of Cape Delgado was restricted to the occasional collection of tribute, and the ‘Captaincy of Malindi’ to serve as a centre of the Indian trade so crucial to Sofala. They tried to control sea traffic with a pass system, and granted a monopoly over certain commodities to the Captain of Malindi. They also tried to cut out Swahili traders from the Sofala trade. All these measures helped to kill the goose that had laid the golden egg. Trade in both gold and ivory declined. Although the Swahili merchant class, legally or otherwise, was able to circumvent these restrictions, it was embittered and felt oppressed, creating a fertile ground for disaffection and revolt.14
By the 1580s the Portuguese empire had already embarked upon its century of decline, caused by both internal decay and external attacks. Portugal proved unable to make the transition from feudalism: high birth and connection with the court remained the main qualifications for high office; and the corrupt monopolistic system of administration and trade in the East hindered the development of mercantile capitalism. Portugal proved no match for the burgeoning English and Dutch mercantile bourgeoisies which began to carve their spheres out of its preserve. It was also unable to resist the revitalised and expansive Iran and the Ottoman empire.15
Turkish incursions in 1585–8 and the instantaneous Swahili revolts shook the foundation of Portuguese rule in East Africa, and led to the building of Fort Jesus at Mombasa to guard Portuguese possessions there. But the oppression of the Swahili merchant class continued, culminating in the alienation of the closest ally of the Portuguese, the Malindi dynasty, which had been transferred to Mombasa. Swahili resistance was fuelled by the revolt of Sultan Yusuf of Mombasa, despite his Portuguese and Christian upbringing. Pate emerged as the standard-bearer of Swahili resistance. It had developed as a centre of Arab and Indian shipping, and had successfully forged commercial links with the interior. The consequent prosperity of Pate seemed to threaten Portuguese hegemony. The closing of the custom house in 1645 converted Pate into a centre of anti-Portuguese insurrection all along the coast. However, the spineless Swahili merchant class was unable to overthrow the Portuguese yoke on its own.
The external ally to whom it turned had a similar history of Portuguese domination over its coastline and of participation in oceanic trade. Omani raids into the Portuguese domains in East Africa may have encouraged Pate’s insurrection, and Omani dhows became an annual feature in East African waters during the second half of the seventeenth century, trading and raiding. By 1652 the whole region was infested with Omani raiders and in open rebellion against the Portuguese. The chronicle of Mombasa specifically states that the Swahili called on the Imam of Oman to relieve them from Portuguese bondage. The rulers of Zanzibar, Pemba and Utondwe repudiated their allegiance to the Portuguese in 1653, though they were soon re-subjugated. In 1661 the Omanis and their Swahili allies briefly occupied Mombasa town, though not the impregnable Fort Jesus. In 1670 they went so far as to attack Mozambique and pillage the town.16
In this struggle between the Portuguese and the Omanis for dominion over the East African coast, different factions of the Swahili merchant class appeared merely as junior partners of the two combatants. For many of the smaller potentates the only practical policy was to remain on friendly terms with both, swaying with the shifting political winds, and sometimes getting flattened by the whirlwind. It is quite clear from the various engagements during the second half of the seventeenth century that the Swahili ruling classes were themselves unable to stand up to the Portuguese on their own. In 1678 Pate, Siu, Lamu and Manda were reconquered by the Portuguese and their rulers beheaded, but with the appearance of an Omani fleet the Portuguese and their Swahili allies abandoned their positions precipitously, though they took with them considerable loot. In 1687 Pate was again conquered and the captive king prepared to renew his allegiance to the Portuguese and exclude the Omanis, but his country was soon to be liberated without him with the mere appearance of the Omani fleet. The end of the Portuguese era in East Africa came with the capture of Mombasa. In 1694 Pemba, the granary of Mombasa, had rebelled against the Portuguese. In 1696 an Omani fleet, supported by the Swahili of Pate and Lamu, began a three-year siege of Fort Jesus. The less than a hundred Portuguese in the garrison were supported by at least fifteen hundred well-armed Swahili refugees from Faza, Malindi and elsewhere, led by the compradorial Prince of Faza who ‘wished to show the world that even the Muslim vassals of your Majesty have Portuguese loyalty’. When the Portuguese relief expedition arrived in December 1698 it found the red flag of Oman flying over the fort.17
Oman, however, was undergoing a fundamental socio-economic revolution and consequent civil war. This external drive could therefore not be sustained. The Swahili ruling class, so soon after being relieved of the Portuguese yoke, did not look with favour on the imposition of an Omani yoke. The Omani garrison at Fort Jesus was driven out soon afterwards. The prolonged interregnum in East Africa contributed to the commercial renaissance of the Swahili coast during the eighteenth century when there was a revival of building activities on the coast and a flowering of Swahili commerce, penetrating deep into the Portuguese domain south of Cape Delgado. This tended to confirm the false sense of security the Swahili city-states felt in maintaining their independence by playing off the two external vultures against each other. They failed to realise that in the absence of a more secure and unified economic base than the transit trade, the power vacuum could not be long maintained. The temporary Portuguese reoccupation of Mombasa in 1728–9 emphasised the point, but failed to teach the lesson. This time the Swahili ruling classes were able to expel the Portuguese by themselves though, for good measure, they requested Omani naval support. They were ultimately unable to stand up to the renovated Oman when it came to demand its pound of flesh. The Swahili merchant classes had to accommodate themselves the best way they could as coastal traders and shippers within what was emerging as the Omani commercial empire.18
The transformation of Oman
In view of the dominant role that Oman was to play in the history of the Swahili coast during the next two centuries, it is necessary to trace the genesis and nature of the Omani state. Oman’s heartland, unlike that of the Swahili coast, was in the interior, in the Green Mountains, the wadis or dry valleys irrigated by subterranean canals (aflaj), and the desert. The main occupations were agriculture and pastoralism, and the main source of revenue was the produce tax. Such was the economic base of the continental theocracy which was often little more than a tribal confederacy. It was presided over by the Imam, a religious leader rather than a monarch, ‘the most considerable’ among a number of petty sovereigns who ruled Oman. He was elected by the elite of the society which consisted of the ‘chiefs’, the ‘nobles’ and the ‘learned’, but he had to be confirmed by the ‘commons’. Although the imamate represented the unification of Oman and a triumph over fissiparous tribal structures, it was still ephemeral. According to Ibadhi ideology, the post did not need to be filled at all times.19
The 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 a concession to build a fortified factory. The 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 this port. The Mazrui governors of Mombasa appointed by the previous Omani dynasty, the Ya’rubi, refused to offer their allegiance. Instead they attempted to indigenise their power base and to embark upon their own Mombasa-based expansion to resist the inevitable Omani invasion. The most stable base of Mazrui rule rested on an intricate hierarchy of relationships between the Mazrui dynasty and the rival Swahili confederacies of Mombasa between whom the Mazrui held the balance, and on a system of patronage that linked the various Swahili and Mijikenda ‘tribes’ of the immediate hinterland on whom depended the economic well-being of the city.35 These relationships proved sturdy enough to withstand nearly a century of struggle, but without a more secure economic base, and before longdistance trade links were forged with the deep interior, the immediate hinterland of Mombasa provided too narrow an economic base to withstand the full weight of Omani pressure.
Map 1.3 The East African coast
Unable to dislodge the Mazrui from Mombasa immediately, the Busaidi were forced to turn to Zanzibar which offered good sheltered harbours and a weak Shirazi dynasty which had learned during the preceding century to swim with the changing political tides. After initially resisting the Portuguese in 1509, Zanzibar is said to have remained friendly to them, even during the 1631 revolt by Mombasa. However, in 1652 the kings of Zanzibar and Pemba destroyed Portuguese settlements and asked for help from Oman, though they were subdued the following year. With the capture of Mombasa by the Omanis in 1699 Zanzibar fell under Omani control, but when Mombasa was reoccupied in 1728 Zanzibar is stated to have offered allegiance to the Portuguese once again. However, this was short-lived. The following year, Zanzibar joined the other Swahili city-states in the final overthrow of Portuguese rule over the Swahili coast.36 By 1744 the Omanis had installed their governor but the local ruler, the Mwinyi Mkuu, was retained as the chief of the indigenous subjects. From their Zanzibari base the Busaidi continued their struggle against the Mazrui. During the eighteenth century they were unable to subjugate Mombasa militarily, though the latter was forced to pay tribute more than once to the Busaidi. But it was the economic struggle for hinterlands that was to prove decisive in the nineteenth century for the subjugation of Mombasa and the whole coastline, and the erection of the Omani commercial empire.37
The Kilwa area was not as critical in the Busaidi-Mazrui struggle though it was to form one of the bases of the commercial empire.38 The Lamu archipelago, on the other hand, was much more critical, and it was here that the tide turned in the struggle. This was the heartland of Swahili resistance to the Omanis just as previously it had been a centre of opposition to the Portuguese. The extension of the conflict into the archipelago set off disastrous internecine warfare during which, according to the ‘History of Pate’, ‘for five years they were not able to cultivate or to trade or do any work whatsoever. So a great famine raged.’ The decline of Pate culminated in the disastrous battle of Shela in 1813 when the Busaidi-backed Lamu routed the combined forces from Pate and Mombasa. As a result Mombasa had to surrender any pretence to control the rich hinterland of the Lamu archipelago, though the Busaidis found it by no means easy to assert their dominance. Calamities at home may have driven the people of the archipelago to seafaring pursuits, acting as coastal traders all along the coast, and even settling abroad. During the first half of the nineteenth century they were found settled along the coast of southern Tanzania and northern Mozambique, as ‘the most recommendable’ local merchants, and in places as chiefs.39
The final act of the struggle was to be played out at Mombasa itself, and it was to demonstrate once more the proverbial weakness of the Swahili merchant class, but also the compradorial character of the Omani state. In 1823 the Omanis captured Pemba, Mombasa’s granary, a move which a British naval officer, Lieutenant Boteler, believed was ‘a great step towards the subjugation of that power by the Imam’. In 1825 they captured the northern Mrima ports, Mombasa’s last commercial outlets outside its territories; this deprived Mombasa of a share of the lucrative trade of what was to become the centrepiece of the Omani commercial empire. The bell of Mombasa’s independence had begun to toll loudly in the ears of the Mazrui who began desperately to look around for external allies. Johanna in the Comoros was itself too weak to be of much help, and the Qawasima of Ras al-Khayma had just been subjugated by the paramount British power. The Mazrui, who in essence differed little in their economic interests and world outlook, therefore, did not hesitate to embrace the same foreign power. They had offered to place themselves under British overlordship as early as 1807–8, and in 1823 they again begged for the British flag so that
beneath its protecting shade we may defy our enemies. As the lamb trembles at the lion’s roar, so will the Imam shrink from that which is the terror of the world.40
This was a rather neat analogy of the relationship between the Mazrui, the Busaidi and the British.
Plate 3 Fort Jesus, Mombasa, overlooking the town and the harbour, c. 1857
Through the impetuous mouth of a Royal Navy captain, W.F. Owen, the British lion did indeed seem to roar. In 1824 he negotiated with the Mazrui an unauthorised declaration of a British protectorate over Mombasa. Under the terms of the convention Owen not only guaranteed the ‘independence’ of Mombasa and the perpetuation of the Mazrui dynasty under British suzerainty, but also promised to reinstate it in its former possessions, Pemba, Lamu, Pate, and the Mrima coast as far south as the Pangani river. In return the Mazrui agreed to abolish the slave trade, a policy in line with what had become the constant preoccupation of the rising industrial capitalists in Britain. They also offered the British half the customs revenue of Mombasa, and freedom to British subjects to trade with the interior. This seemed to offer the prospect of a new market for British goods. As the British Governor of Mauritius, Sir Lowry Cole, put it:
I am inclined to consider it as presenting a favourable means for putting down the Slave Trade as well as for opening a commerce with the eastern coast of Africa which might ultimately be of advantage to the mercantile interests of Great Britain. . . .41
For good measure Captain Owen used the old and potent argument of the threat of French intervention, and he capped it all with an ideological justification that barely camouflaged the material interests of the rising British capitalism of which the philanthropists and the British navy were objectively the vanguard:
It is to me as clear as the sun that God has prepared the dominion of East Africa for the only nation on the earth which had public virtue enough to govern it for its own benefit . . . I have taken my own line to the honour of God and my King and to the benefit of my country and of all mankind.42
Owen, however, was a premature manifestation of British capitalism; it sought at this stage an empire without boundaries, economic domination through free trade, and indirect political control through subordinate states rather than the heavy burden of a colonial empire.
Abolition of the slave trade was certainly high on the agenda of the British government at this time. It had just negotiated with the Sultan the Moresby Treaty which prohibited the export of slaves to the Americas and European colonies in the Indian Ocean. But the Omani governor of Lamu seems to have understood the British strategy of restricting and ultimately abolishing the slave trade better than Owen himself. As he shrewdly put it, the unification of the East African coast under the Sultan was essential, ‘for not until then will the British have power to put an effectual termination to the Slave Trade.’43 As regards the wider strategy in the western Indian Ocean, the British government had already chosen its surrogate. It therefore had little interest in jeopardising a laboriously constructed strategy for British paramountcy, in which Oman played a central role, by supporting a smaller power in East Africa. In 1823 the Governor of Bombay had replied to the Mazrui request for British protection by saying that ‘fidelity to our engagements with His Highness the Imam of Muscat would prevent our acceding to your proposal.’ When Owen declared the protectorate anyway, the Bombay governor argued strenuously that the Sultan of Oman:
has always been our faithful and cordial ally and not only has he cooperated with us in all our attempts to put down piracy in the Persian Gulf, but has on more than one occasion refrained from enterprises that promised to be profitable to him, because we represented to him that his engaging in them would be inconsistent with our policy.44
Faced with the outstretched hands of two suitors clamouring for protection under their hegemony, the British accepted that of their old and faithful protégés, the Busaidi, who were not only already subservient to British power, but were also still capable of subjugating Mombasa to their own, and ultimately, therefore, to British overlordship.
British protection over Mombasa was therefore withdrawn in 1826, but anxious not to provide an opening for the French the British government recommended a policy of conciliation with the Mazrui to the Omanis. Deprived of British support, the Mazrui were now forced to compromise. They were prepared to acknowledge formal Omani suzerainty and resume payment of tribute, but they demanded a confirmation of their hereditary claims to the governorship and refused to surrender Fort Jesus. Although the Sultan was unable to take Fort Jesus by force of arms, and unable to keep it when he took it by treachery, the economic blockade that he imposed on Mombasa began to create severe strains in the network of alliances which had formed the basis of Mombasa’s independence. Its collapse facilitated the final coup de grace in 1837. The leading Mazrui were either deported or fled to establish their own petty states along the Kenya coast. However, the merchant class of Mombasa, consisting of the other Arabs, the Swahili and their Mijikenda allies, were incorporated within the emerging Omani commercial empire.45
Conclusion
The common experience of Portuguese oppression had brought together the Swahili and Omani merchant classes in a partnership to overthrow Portuguese rule north of Cape Delgado. But that partnership was unequal. Though they pretended to walk on high stilts of political independence, the Swahili merchant classes were politically too fragmented and economically too dependent on international trade to stand on their own feet. The Omanis, on the other hand, had started from the interior which provided a more secure economic and political base for their independence. However, with the rise of the merchant class to political dominance the centre of economic and political gravity shifted to the coast, and the economy and the state became increasingly dependent on international trade. This shift, moreover, coincided with the rise of capitalism in Europe and the inauguration of an epoch of world domination by capital. The merchant class flourished with the expansion of international trade that the rise of capitalism entailed. But the Omani state that they ruled was simultaneously subordinated, being converted into a compradorial state that acted as an economic and political agent of the foremost capitalist state of the era, Britain.
Through the agency of Omani expansionism the East African coast thus began to be integrated, if indirectly, into the international capitalist-dominated system. However, other economic forces, emanating also from the development of capitalism, began to impinge directly on the East African coast from the last quarter of the eighteenth century, more effectively integrating it into the system, economically and ultimately politically.
Notes
1. The word ‘Swahili’ is derived from the Arabic word which means the coast. It is used to refer to Kiswahili, a Bantu language with a considerable number of Arabic, Persian and Indian loanwords, betraying its maritime and mercantile history. It is also used to refer to Waswahili, coastal people who speak the language and are generally Muslim, and to the coastal Muslim culture generally. See Nicholls, p. 19; Prins (1965), pp. 24–7, 38–49; Whiteley (1969), p. vii; Krumm, p. 2.
2. Kirk, pp. 263–7; McMaster, pp. 13–24; Datoo (1974), pp. 23–33.
3. Sheriff (1975a), pp. 12–13.
4. ibid., p. 11; Martin and Ryan, p. 73. Martin and Ryan have gathered evidence to show a continuation of the slave trade between the tenth and the eighteenth centuries. While this is indisputable, there is little evidence to show that the scale of the trade was comparable to the two major periods of the slave trade, the seventh to ninth centuries, and the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries. Austen’s attempt to quantify the slave trade is based on inadequate data, and has little virtue other than its provision of a total figure for the East African slave trade of dubious authenticity with which to compare the West African slave trade. See Chapter 2, below, for a fuller discussion of Austen’s figures.
5. Strandes, pp. 89–94; Sheriff (1975a), pp. 17–18.
6. Freeman-Grenville (ed.) (1962a), p. 19.
7. ibid., p. 2.
8. Mathew, p. 96; Chau Ju Kua, p. 130; Wheatley, p. 97; Strandes, p. 90; Garlake, p. 89.
9. Freeman-Grenville (ed.) (1962a), pp. 133–4.
10. Garlake, p. 2; Sheriff (1975a), pp. 15, 19; Strandes, pp. 88–91.
11. Panikkar, p. 13; Strandes, pp. 56–8.
12. Datoo and Sheriff, p. 102; Strandes, pp. 97–8.
13. Strandes, pp. 71–3, 119–26, 39, 45, 106–10.
14. ibid., pp. 114–30; Boxer and Azevedo, p. 28.
15. Strandes, pp. 312, 319.
16. ibid., pp. 228–30; Boxer and Azevedo, pp. 47–8.
17. Strandes, pp. 232, 237–8, 240; Boxer and Azevedo, pp. 50–1, 57–69.
18. Miles, pp. 221, 250; Strandes, p. 291; Alpers (1966), p. 156.
19. Wilkinson (1972), pp. 69, 75–6; Salil, pp. 46, 51, 53, 78, 84; Niebuhr, Vol. 2, p. 113; Halliday, p. 267.
20. Salil, pp. 65, 69, 89, 92, 100; Bathurst (1967), pp. 137, 205–6.
21. Salil, p. 93; Bathurst (1967), pp. 205–6.
22. Salil, pp. 51, 57, 84, 90, 100, 176, 200, 216–18.
23. Bathurst (1972), pp. 103–6.
24. Salil, pp. 152, 202, 342; Wilkinson (1972), pp. 77–8; Kelly (1972), p. 109; Bathurst (1972), pp. 101–2; Phillips (1967), p. 66. Said b. Sultan, however, continued to be referred to, incorrectly, as the Imam in British sources well into the nineteenth century. Nicholls, pp. 22, 101. Frederick Cooper seems to reject this whole analysis of social transformation, but presents little evidence to refute it or an alternative interpretation for the overthrow of the Ya’rubi dynasty (unless it is merely one of a series of ‘communal feuds’), and for the secularisation of the ruler’s title. See Cooper (1977), pp. 30–3.
25. Strandes, pp. 239–40.
26. Miles, p. 237; Strandes, p. 266; Bathurst (1967), p. 137.
27. Mukherjee, pp. 110–12, 118; Coupland (1938), pp. 84–6.
28. Coupland (1938), pp. 95–8; Phillips (1967), pp. 70, 72; Nicholls, p. 105.
29. Nicholls, p. 98; Maurizi, p. 30; IOR, P/174/16, nos 60–71; P/174/8, nos 58–72; P/419/41, nos 49, 52, 54.
30. Gavin (1965), p. 19; Nicholls, pp. 97–9.
31. Gavin (1965), p. 20; Miles, p. 270; IOR, P/174/28; Smee, in IOR, MR, Misc. 586, entries for 23 February and 1 April 1811.
32. Nicholls, p. 98; Winder, p. 35.
33. Winder, p. 37.
34. Coupland (1938), p. 116.
35. Berg (1968), pp. 35–56.
36. Strandes, pp. 111, 118, 136, 199, 211, 228, 275–6, 285–93.
37. Nicholls, p. 126, Gray (1962a), pp. 83–5. The existing histories of the Mazrui seem to pass over the less glorious periods in silence. A version of it appears in Freeman–Grenville (ed.) (1962a), pp. 213–19, but see also p. 193; Alpers (1966), p. 155; Freeman–Grenville (1965), p.128.
38. See Table 5.1.
39. Nicholls, pp. 122, 125; Alpers (1966), pp. 226–7; Loarer, ‘Ports au sud et au nord de Zanguebar’, in ANSOM, OI, 2/10.
40. Coupland (1938), pp. 225, 221–2; Boteler, Vol. 2, pp. 1–2; Nicholls, p. 132; Gray (1957), passim.
41. Coupland (1938), pp. 244, 236.
42. ibid., p. 238.
43. ibid., p. 235.
44. ibid., pp. 260–1; Nicholls, pp. 141–2.
45. Coupland (1938), pp. 272–3; Berg (1971), pp. 133–7.
