Muscat and Oman

The Sultanate of Muscat and Oman was the south-east Arabian state ruled by the Al Said (Al Busaid) dynasty from the division of the Omani Empire in 1856 until 1970, when a palace coup brought Qaboos bin Said to power and the country was renamed Oman. For most of that time it was a coastal sultanate under informal British protection, uneasily sharing the land with an inland Ibadi imamate. At times its sultans also held Gwadar on the far side of the Gulf of Oman.

The double name reflects an old division. Muscat was the seafaring coast on the Gulf of Oman, whose rulers looked outwards and often expanded overseas. Oman, in the strict sense, was the landlocked interior, with its centres at Nizwa and Rustaq, separated from the coast by the Jebel Akhdar, the "Green Mountain" plateau. Its tribes followed the Ibadi branch of Islam and recognised elected imams, while the sultans' authority there was often only nominal. Two other regions, the "Pirate Coast" to the north-west and Dhofar in the south, completed the picture.

In the seventeenth century the Yaruba imams drove the Portuguese from Muscat, a turning point usually dated to 1650, and built a sea empire reaching to the Persian Gulf and the Swahili coast. The Al Busaid dynasty took power in 1749 after Imam Ahmad bin Said ended Persian domination. Britain, wanting to keep rival European powers out, backed the Muscat sultans through a series of treaties, and the sultanate came to depend on British loans and advice. In the early 1820s most Gulf possessions were lost to what became the British-protected Trucial States, and pressure to end the slave trade further reduced Muscat's wealth.

When Sultan Said bin Sultan died on 4 June 1856 without naming an heir, British mediation split his realm. His son Thuwaini took the Arabian mainland, while another son, Majid, became ruler of the separate Sultanate of Zanzibar.

Resentment of British influence revived the imamate in the interior. In 1913 Imam Salim Alkharusi led a rising against Muscat, which the sultan resisted with British help. The Treaty of Seeb of 1920, under Sultan Taimur bin Faisal, gave the imamate limited autonomy. From 1920 to about 1932 a rebel relative of the sultan also held the northern town of Sohar as a self-proclaimed sultan, until the British deposed him.

Oil exploration began in the 1920s and sharpened the rivalry. Under Sultan Said bin Taimur, who ruled a country with almost no modern infrastructure and banned radios as decadent, British officials held most ministerial posts. When the sultan licensed the Iraq Petroleum Company to explore lands claimed by the imamate, the last imam, Ghalib bin Ali, rose in 1954. Fighting resumed in 1957 with backing from Saudi Arabia; British forces bombarded Nizwa, the imamate's capital, and the last rebels were defeated in 1959. The Treaty of Seeb was ended and the imamate abolished. Gwadar, the last overseas possession, was sold to Pakistan in 1958.

A new insurgency, the Dhofar Rebellion, supported by communist South Yemen, persuaded the British that the sultan should go. His Western-educated son Qaboos, who had been kept confined in the palace, carried out a palace coup with British military help on 23 July 1970. Qaboos reorganised the newly united territories as the Sultanate of Oman by August that year.

Our 1920, 1930 and 1938 maps show Muscat and Oman across south-eastern Arabia, next to Trucial Oman, today's United Arab Emirates, and Yemen; by 1938 Saudi Arabia appears on its western edge.