Note: For more details see Sources, pp. 259–65 below.
Glossary
| Imam | Spiritual title of the Ibadhi ruler of Oman traditionally elected by the ulema and the tribal shaikhs. It declined in significance during the latter part of the eighteenth century with the secularisation of the Omani state, but was revived in the late 1860s. |
| Seyyid | Lord, used in Oman and Zanzibar to refer to the more secular ruler, and to members of the ruling dynasty. |
| Shaikh | Heads of tribal and clan groupings in Oman; also a term of respect used more generally. |
| Shamba | A Swahili word for plantation or plot of land. |
| Sultan | Secular title of the ruler of Oman and Zanzibar emphasising the temporal aspect of his position. |
| Ulema | Religious experts in Islam; played an important role in the election of the Imam in Oman. |
Currency and Weights
CURRENCY
Cruzado (Cr) A Portuguese silver coin with a fluctuating value: 1777: 3.75 Cr = 1 Piastre (see below); 1813: 2.60 Cr = 1 Piastre.1
Maria Theresa Dollar (MT$) A coin known as the Austrian Crown, the ‘Black dollar’, Kursh or Rial. Current on the East African coast until the 1860s when it began to be replaced by the American dollar. 1 MT$ = Rs 2.10–2.23 during the first half of the nineteenth century. £1 = MT$ 4.75. Spanish, Mexican Piastres or dollars and American dollars were exchanged at Zanzibar at 1 per cent to 6 per cent discount.2
Rupee (Rs) The Indian unit of currency. Before 1836 different parts of India had their own coins. The universal rupee was established in that year, but the value fluctuated until 1899: 1803–1813: 1 Spanish Dollar = Rs2.38–2.14. 1841–1868: 1 Spanish dollar = Rs2.10–2.18.3
WEIGHTS
Arroba (Ar) A Portuguese unit equal to 14.688 kg.4
Frasela (Fr) A unit widely used along the East African coast varying from 27 lbs or 12.393 kg in Mozambique; 35 lbs in Zanzibar; 36 lbs on the Benadir.5
Maund An Indian unit, of varying weight. The Surat maund used to weigh ivory equalled 37-1/2 lbs.6
Sources:
1. Freeman-Grenville (1965), p. 88; Milburn, Vol. 1, p. 60.
2. See p. 136 below. Milburn, Vol. 1, p. 198; Burton (1872), Vol. 1, pp. 324–5, Vol. 2, pp. 406, 418–19; MAE, CCZ, Vol. III, pp. 344–9; Bennett and Brooks (eds) (1965), pp. 477, 499, 534–5.
3. Phillips (ed.) (1951), p. 62; Milburn, Vol. 1, p. 116; Hamerton to Bombay, 3 January 1841, MA, 54/1840–1, pp. 20–2; Churchill to Bombay, 28 October 1868, MA, 156/1869, pp. 120–1.
4. Alpers (1975), p. xiv.
5. ibid.; Fabens to Hamblet, 10 October 1846, PM, Fabens Papers, II.
6. Milburn, Vol. 1, p. 159.
Plate 1 Zanzibar from the sea, c.1857
Introduction
The Commercial Empire
Zanzibar developed during the nineteenth century as the seat of a vast commercial empire that in some ways resembled the mercantile empires of Europe of the preceding centuries. Unlike them, however, it was developing at a time when capitalism was already on its way to establishing its sway over industrial production and was subordinating merchant capital to its own needs. In the capitalist metropoles this entailed the disintegration of merchant capital’s monopoly position and the reduction of its rate of profit to the general average. It was thus being reduced to an agent of productive capital with a specific function: distributing goods produced by industry and supplying the latter with the necessary raw materials.1
But capitalism was simultaneously developing as a world system as it gradually drew the different corners of the globe into its fold. In this historic process merchant capital played a vanguard role. As a form of capital it shared the dynamism arising out of profit maximisation and the drive towards accumulation of the capitalist classes. This drive, therefore, pushed it to encourage constant expansion in the scale of production of exchange values without itself participating in actual production. Existing as it did at the periphery of the expanding capitalist system, it seemed to enjoy its pristine position and relative autonomy. Backward conditions here enabled it to monopolise trade and appropriate a handsome rate of profit that appeared to guarantee primacy to the merchant classes. That primacy, however, was illusory, for capitalism was close on their heels, subverting them step by step, and ultimately subordinating them to its own rule. In examining the history of Zanzibar during the nineteenth century, therefore, it is necessary to consider closely what Karl Marx termed the ‘historical facts about merchant capital’.2
Zanzibar was essentially a commercial intermediary between the African interior and the capitalist industrialising West, and it acted as a conveyor belt transmitting the demands of the latter for African luxuries and raw materials, and supplying in exchange imported manufactured goods. Economic movements in East Africa from the eighteenth century onwards were primarily based on two major commodities and two fundamental transformations. Increased Omani participation in Indian Ocean trade, particularly after the overthrow of Portuguese hegemony over their coastline, had given impetus to the emergence of an Omani merchant class which began to invest part of its profit in the production of dates using slave labour. To this important but limited demand for African slaves was added during the last third of the eighteenth century a substantial French demand for slaves to be supplied to their sugar colonies in the Mascarenes3 and even to the Americas. But the period characterised by European mercantilism, of which the slave trade was an aspect, was rapidly drawing to a close. The strangulation of the European slave trade after the end of Anglo-French warfare in the Indian Ocean, however, provided an unexpected opportunity and a new lease of life to the slave mode of production in East Africa at the periphery of the world system dominated by capital. A vital transformation of the slave sector was therefore initiated during the first quarter of the nineteenth century as Arab slave traders began to divert slaves to the clove plantations of Zanzibar, and later to the grain plantations on the East African coast. Thus the sector was metamorphosed from being primarily one dominated by the export of slave labour to one that exploited that labour within East Africa to produce commodities to feed into the world system of trade.
The second economic transformation was activated initially by the collapse of the supply of ivory from Mozambique