ABSTRACT
In the seventeenth century that situation had changed as the country was first convulsed by a civil war and then united under the imamate of Nasir b. Murshid al-Ya'aribi. Nasir was unable to expel the Portuguese, an honor that fell to his successor, he did begin two centuries in which Oman became the major Asian power in the western Indian Ocean. By the mid-nineteenth century, though, Omani glory was at an end. Europeans came to control the Indian Ocean trade, and their need for maritime stability prevented the sayyids from asserting their control over recalcitrant neighbors. Domestically, the conflict between the religious ideal of the imamate and the reality of commercial empire resulted in still more political turmoil, ending with the reestablishment of an imamate in 1868. For two hundred years between 1624 and 1856 Oman was an international power with territorial control extending to the Gulf and the east coast of Africa.
