The Arms Trade in the Western Indian Ocean

By the closing decades of the long nineteenth century, the port-cities of Muscat and Zanzibar had achieved notoriety as principal gateways for arms traffic in the western Indian Ocean. Even as munitions made in Europe inundated their harbours and warehouses, there were European navies mounting surveillance and interdiction operations in nearby tropical waters. By 1880, it was estimated that firearms comprised more than one-third of Zanzibar’s total imports.2 Breech-loaders had begun to flow into East Africa within a year of their being superseded by repeaters in Europe, so that as early as 1886, numerous modern rifles were found in the arsenal of a Chagga chief.3 In 1889, when the Welsh journalist and explorer Henry Morton Stanley ‘rescued’ Emin Pasha in the Lake Albert area, he found a section of the latter’s native troops equipped with breech-loaders.4

Ancient history · Archaeology · Geography · Pasha · Port (circuit theory) · Swahili · African history and culture studies · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Engineering · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History