Sultanate of Zanzibar

Ruled by an Arab dynasty of Omani origin from Stone Town on the island of Unguja, the Sultanate of Zanzibar was an East African Muslim state that existed from 1856 to 1964. At its height its sultans claimed much of the Swahili coast and trade routes reaching deep into the continent, but European colonisation stripped away the mainland, Britain made the islands a protectorate in 1890, and a revolution ended the monarchy in January 1964.

Zanzibar entered the Omani orbit in 1698, after the Imam of Oman, Saif bin Sultan, drove the Portuguese from Mombasa. In the nineteenth century the Omani ruler Said bin Sultan shifted his court from Muscat to Stone Town, in 1832 or 1840 according to different sources. He installed an Arab ruling class and promoted clove plantations worked by enslaved people, and he encouraged merchants from the Indian subcontinent, who came to dominate the island's commerce.

When Said died in 1856, his sons Thuwaini and Majid quarrelled over the succession, and the realm was split. Thuwaini kept Muscat and Oman, while Majid became the first sultan of Zanzibar, though he had to send a yearly tribute to Muscat. Majid built his power on the slave trade, which flourished in the second half of the century. Under British pressure, his successor Barghash bin Said moved to end the trade and invested in public works, and the next sultan, Khalifa bin Said, continued the move towards abolition.

Until 1884 Zanzibar's influence stretched along the coast of Zanj and inland as far as Kindu on the Congo River. That year German agents began signing protection treaties with mainland chiefs, and in the age of the Berlin Conference and the Scramble for Africa, Britain and Germany carved the region into spheres of influence. Both leased coastal land from the sultan. From 1888 the Imperial British East Africa Company ran Mombasa, while German rule on the southern coast provoked the Abushiri revolt, crushed by the German navy. In 1888 and 1889 a German-led naval blockade pressed Sultan Khalifa to enforce the treaties against slave and arms trading.

Under the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty of 1890 between Britain and the German Empire, Zanzibar became a British protectorate. In August 1896, when Sultan Hamad bin Thuwaini died, his cousin Khalid bin Barghash seized the palace against British wishes. On the morning of 27 August British forces attacked the palace, and the resistance collapsed after about 38 minutes, often called the shortest war on record. Khalid fled into exile and the British candidate, Hamoud bin Mohammed, became sultan. On the mainland, a ten-mile coastal strip remained nominally the sultan's but was governed with British Kenya until 1963.

Britain ended the protectorate on 10 December 1963, leaving Zanzibar a constitutional monarchy under Sultan Jamshid bin Abdullah. Society was divided along lines that politics followed closely: Arabs, wealthier as the main landowners, dominated the Zanzibar Nationalist Party, while most Africans backed the Afro-Shirazi Party. On 12 January 1964 revolutionaries overthrew the government, Jamshid fled, and the violence included mass killings of Arabs, with the dead put by some accounts in the tens of thousands. In April 1964 the new People's Republic joined Tanganyika in a union that became Tanzania.

Our maps show the sultanate in 1880, when it still claimed a long stretch of the East African coast, and in 1900, by which time it had become a British protectorate.