Said bin Sultan
Said bin Sultan ruled Muscat and Oman for fifty years, built the largest fleet in the Indian Ocean west of India, took Zanzibar and the East African coast from Mogadishu to Cape Delgado, moved his capital to Zanzibar in 1840 and planted it with the cloves that made the island rich and its slave market the largest on the coast, and left an empire that his sons and the British divided into two sultanates within five years of his death. He was born in 1791, took the throne in 1806 at fifteen by stabbing the cousin who was regent at a dinner, and spent his first twenty years holding Oman against the Wahhabis of Najd, the Qawasim pirates of the Gulf and the British, who bombarded Ras al-Khaimah in 1819 and whom he then chose as allies. The treaty of 1822 with Britain that banned the sale of slaves to Christians was the first of many he signed and did not enforce. The East African coast had been Omani in name since the Portuguese were driven from Mombasa in 1698, and he made it Omani in fact by taking Mombasa from its Mazrui governors in 1837 after a decade of sieges, and by making Zanzibar what Muscat could not be. It was a port with rain, an island the mainland caravans could not reach, and a plantation colony. Cloves, introduced in the 1810s, covered the island by the 1840s and were worked by slaves brought from the interior by the caravans of the Swahili-Arab traders of the interior, whose ivory paid for the rest. The American consul arrived in 1837 and the British in 1841, and Said's trading ship the Sultanah reached New York in 1840, the first Arab vessel to do so. He governed by consent and commerce rather than by an army, kept Hindu merchants from Kutch as his bankers, and had thirty-six children by a harem of Circassians and Africans. He died at sea in October 1856 on the way back to Zanzibar from Muscat, and the British arbitration of 1861 gave Zanzibar to one son and Oman to another, with the African sultanate paying the Arabian one a subsidy. Zanzibar's slave market closed in 1873 and the sultanate ended in the revolution of 1964.
- Lived: 1791 CE – 1856 CE
- Nationality: Omani
- Roles: sultan, monarch
