The powerful navy of the Sultan of…

The powerful navy of the Sultan of Muscat had enabled the creation of a short-lived empire, encompassing modern Oman, the United Arab Emirates, southern Baluchistan, and Zanzibar and the adjacent coasts of Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique.

The Sultanate also engages in a very lucrative slave trade across east Africa. (A recent claim by an Omani minister suggests that the Sultanate controlled the distant Mascarene Islands as early as the fifteenth century.)

The fifth Sultan of the Al Said line of rulers, Said Said bin Sultan Al-Said, who will be remembered as the greatest 19th century sultan of Oman, has consolidated the Sultanate's territorial holdings and economic interests and Oman has prospered.

However, the Omani fleet is unable to compete with the more technically advanced European fleets and by the mid 1820s, the Sultanate had lost much of the trade with India and most of its territories in the Persian Gulf.

Said, shifting his focus to coastal East Africa, had established a treaty of friendship with the United States in 1833, while also strengthening his ties with Great Britain.