ABSTRACT
Linked from the outset to the Arab-Omani-Islamic communities of East Africa (the Zanzibar coast), the Omani-Ya=rubite state only began really cultivating that link after its liberation from the Portuguese yoke at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Having now become the second centre of economic interest for the powers in Oman, the Swahili coast came gradually to be seen as an extension of Oman until, in the nineteenth century, it became the true centre of wealth of the Omani state, now threatened with strangulation by British expansion. The sultan of Muscat even moved his capital to Zanzibar. This chapter considers how the Omani-African relationship developed up to the separation from Zanzibar in the second half of the nineteenth century.
