Our Series on Former Countries takes us to the Sultanate of Zanzibar, an entity that existed as an independent country from 1856 to 1890.
The Zanzibar Archipelago was a major trading post of the Eastern Trade, where slaves from sub-Saharan Africa were sold and shipped to the Arabian Peninsula. For a long time, Zanzibar was a dependency of the Sultan of Oman, whose base was in the Southeast corner of the Arabian Peninsula. At that point, the Sultan did not only control the Zanzibar Islands, but also a strip of coastal land in Eastern Africa, in present-day Kenya and Tanzania. A dispute between two sons of the Sultan led to the partition between Oman and Zanzibar in 1856. The new Sultanate kept its mainland possessions, but the appetite of European powers for Africa led Britain and Germany to outline their zones of influence in the region. Germany took control of the southern portion and Britain of the Northern portion of the coastal lands in 1888. The Sultan of Zanzibar later agreed to a treaty of protection with Britain, which allowed the Sultanate to remain in place under the British Protectorate, established in 1890. When the Protectorate ended in 1963, the Sultan was deposed by a revolution. A republican regime was declared over Zanzibar, but the new state soon merged with Tanganyika to create the new Republic of Tanzania.
The Sultanate of Zanzibar
