The First Sultan of Zanzibar. Scrambling for Power and Trade in the Nineteenth Century Indian Ocean

Along the shores of the Indian Ocean, contacts and relations between the people of the Asian, Arabian and East African coasts were innumerable and stretched back to time immemorial. Such links and relationships of power were to be sought in those elements which constituted the close equilibrium of the Indian Ocean, that is, in the monsoons, the presence of commercial thalassocracies (the well known ‘merchant-states’), the predominance of mercantile laws, the trade routes of spices and ivory, in European desires for conquest of commercial monopolies, in the slave trade … in brief, in all those factors essential to the creation of multiple ties, of a “cultural bow” which would link three continents: Europe, Asia and Africa.