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