The establishment in Zanzibar of foreign consulates marks, at a formal level, the transfer of Sa'id's court and other change.

The United States had opened a consulate in 1837, followed by Britain in 1841, and France in 1844, simultaneously signing a treaty with the last.

These countries, with Germany, become the principal buyers, but Sa'id also exports goods in his own ships to Arabia and India and, occasionally, to Europe and to the United States.

By the 1840s, he has made Zanzibar the principal power in eastern Africa and the commercial capital of the western Indian Ocean.

He says, in all seriousness, “I am nothing but a merchant.”

By 1842, the average annual import of slaves is reported as approximately fifteen thousand, many of these necessitated by the development of the clove plantations of Zanzibar and ...