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Paper short abstract:

Although Zanzibar's sultans of the C19 had divergent and competing visions for the future of their territories, they broadly shared in their resistance to abolition. Even so, abolition was not the only way to end slavery, this paper examines the practices and rationales of manumission.

Paper long abstract:

Zanzibar’s sultans, of which there were seven in the nineteenth century, had divergent and competing visions for the future of their territories. Slavery – its curtailment, and its management – loomed large as the British, as well as other European and American powers, increasingly applied pressure. With their limited sovereignty, each sultan fought to balance the interests of foreign powers and 'leading Arabs' in the region. But politics and diplomacy were not the only forces driving the sultans’ strategies and policies with regards to slavery. The sultans were Ibadi Muslims, and thus held ideologies that shaped the way they envisioned the future of the Sultanate, the slave owners, and the enslaved. Abolition was, it seems, a foreign and unpopular concept, but manumission was a comparable – though entirely distinct – strategy for ending slavery. Manumission was by its very nature a forward-looking practice because the benefits of manumission were not to be found in this world, but the next. When sultans and other elites manumitted hundreds of enslaved persons rather than let them be emancipated by abolitionist laws, they were taking a different path to the Euro-American vision of abolition. This paper addresses a need to understand the perspectives and ideologies of Zanzibar’s sultans with regards to policies on slavery and abolition. by interrogating the sultans’ visions and strategies and seeks to establish whether they saw the end of slavery as inevitable.