Conclusion

Summary

The subordination of the Omani commercial empire to British over-rule, which culminated in the partition of the Omani kingdom and the imposition of the 1873 treaty, and eventually in the partition of the African section of the empire between European colonial powers and the declaration of a British Protectorate over Zanzibar in 1890, was part of a long process that was economic as well as political. The social transformation in Oman during the eighteenth century, as a result of increased Omani participation in Indian Ocean trade, had given rise to a mercantile dynasty and state that by their very nature became increasingly dependent on international trade and on the dominant power in the western Indian Ocean. Omani expansion to East Africa was occurring at a time when Britain was consolidating its hold over India, which was a major market for Omani trade, and over the Persian Gulf, which the Busaidi dynasty had considered to be its natural preserve. It was also occurring at a time when Britain was going through a historic revolution from which it was to emerge as the foremost capitalist power. This involved the subordination of merchant capital to serve the needs of the emerging capitalist mode of production on a world scale. The commercial empire that was developing during the nineteenth century, therefore, was growing in the shadow of this epic process, a process that entailed its assimilation into the world system of trade and, in the long run, the subjugation of the Omani state to hegemonic British influence.

During this process a major impetus was given to economic expansion at the periphery of the world system. The suppression of the European slave trade, which was part of the genesis of capitalism,1 was to give encouragement to the transformation of the slave sector in East Africa. The loss of the market for slaves in the French sugar colonies in the Mascarenes and in the Americas had encouraged Arab slave traders to divert that labour to the clove plantations on Zanzibar when clove prices were extremely attractive, and later to the grain plantations on the East African coast. A large proportion of the slave-produced commodities fed into the world system of trade to supply not only the culinary and alimentary needs of Asia, but, more importantly, also the expanding industrial needs of the West for raw materials such as vegetable oils.