Buying Time. Thomas F. McDow
bin Sultan’s challenges in Arabia from the Wahhabi forces demonstrated the complex calculus of local and regional rivals. Between 1800 and 1820, the area around Wadi Ma‘awil was home to a series of violent destructive conflicts. The Wahhabi attacks on the well-watered date-farming region at the southern end of the Batinah coast and the areas northwest of Muscat and near Wadi Sumayl were retribution for Said bin Sultan’s activity in the gulf. Said bin Sultan had allied with the East India Company in 1809 to thwart his rivals the Qawasim of Ras al-Khayma and their Wahhabi allies.43 When the East India Company’s ships withdrew, however, the Wahhabi staged multiple punitive expeditions against Oman, and the Wadi Ma‘awil was hit hard. In response to the Wahhabi alliance with Said’s local rivals, the Omani ruler requested military support from the Persian shah and received 1,500 cavalrymen.44 Some of the pitched battles lasted nearly two weeks. Foreign troops occupied local settlements, and fighting spilled into the marketplace.45 Both sides destroyed their enemies’ date plantations, cutting down trees in contravention of Ibadi laws of war, and crushing the local agricultural economy.46 Seyyid Said failed to bring peace when he captured the fort at Nakhl, because the governor he appointed abused the local populace. They insisted that the governor be removed or they would emigrate, but the replacement was also cruel.47 Even as Said bin Sultan launched attacks on Bahrain in the gulf, the war in Wadi al-Ma‘awīl continued until the late 1810s when, after sending a large contingent from Sharqiya, Said bin Sultan negotiated a temporary settlement in the region.48 The fight with the Wahhabi and their allies threatened Said bin Sultan’s rule and destabilized the local population. These rivalries also pushed Said bin Sultan to ally frequently with British forces, and he spent much of his career negotiating with Europeans in the Indian Ocean.
As with domestic forces, Said engaged in a subtle balancing act with European nations, and his move to Africa brought him into closer contact with them. He sought trading advantages through commercial treaties, but he tried to limit the role of European traders, especially in his African dependencies. For much of his reign, Europeans were forbidden from trading on the African mainland. He funneled all business through Zanzibar. There, Indian merchants and financiers, some of whom had followed him from Muscat (where their families had lived for generations), oversaw trade on behalf of Said, and they imposed customs duties on all goods. In Oman, foreign merchants were limited to the port cities. In the 1840s, British traders desired direct access to the products of the African mainland, and their government wanted to curtail the slave trade. Said bin Sultan signed treaties in 1822 and 1845 to limit the trade of slaves within his dominion. Although these treaties only applied to European subjects and did not prohibit Said’s subjects from keeping, selling, or transporting slaves within East Africa, the measures were not popular in Said’s African territories. European observers noted the limited strength of the Zanzibari state and its inability to control Africa beyond its primary trading ports.
Said had been forced to balance these interests and strategize among their connections to maintain his precarious command of these far-flung realms. To maintain his interests, he often needed to be present in Arabia or Africa, and even after he had moved his court to Zanzibar in 1832, events in Oman or the Persian Gulf frequently beckoned him north. Such absences, dependent on the twice-yearly monsoon winds to facilitate his voyage, could easily stretch over a year. Seyyid Said’s rule thus relied upon loyal governors, mercenaries, and tax collectors. When Said traveled, he did so warily, sometimes insisting that rivals from tribal factions, prominent families, or learned Ibadi ulama travel with him.49 In this increasingly connected Indian Ocean world of Seyyid Said’s dominions, the ruler compelled some elites to move with him. Others, facing desperate circumstances, chose to move in his wake.
Temporizing in the Face of Drought
The drought that struck across the Nizwa region in the 1840s created dwindling resources and mounting desperation. People had to make choices about their very survival, and their reactions to the drought demonstrate how and why mobility became a solution. In Manaḥ, seven miles from Nizwa, the prolonged drought dried up seven of the eight springs that watered the town. Formerly cultivated land lay in ruin, and the lack of water destroyed date groves. Dead trees marked the approach to the walled town, where two-storied stone and mud houses lined the narrow streets. In wetter, more prosperous times, the settlement had produced sugar cane in abundance. In the small date groves that persisted, the people had no spare fodder for the animals. Only one plantation northeast of town continued to flourish, presumably because it had access to the only remaining water source. Want of water reduced the population in Manaḥ. In the decade of drought (1835–45), the town lost half of its population: only 500 residents remained.50
As the drought’s realities set in, people had to make difficult choices about how to use the water that came from the falaj and how to guarantee their own survival. We have no intimate portrait of drought in the interior during the first half of the nineteenth century. Given the continuities of agriculture and life ways, however, a more recent example provides a basis for comparison. The experience of the village of Ghayzayn, in Wadi Hawasina on the eastern side of the Hajar Mountains, where “drought began to erode the wealth of the community” in the 1970s, is illustrative.51
The people of Ghayzayn, having faced three years without rainfall, initially tried to use water more efficiently. They opened only one of the two irrigation streams from the falaj, halving the normal irrigation cycle. Next, they filled a cistern above the falaj to increase the flow when they did let the water run. As the months wore on, however, decreased irrigation took its toll. Young palms, which were future assets, died, as did the lime trees growing with them. Villagers took more drastic steps, allowing crops to wither. They first cut water to their field crops (wheat, tomatoes, and onion) and then to their fodder crop (alfalfa). All the remaining water was used for date palms, but the year’s yield was nevertheless diminished. The drought’s effects were both immediate and ongoing. Dates and alfalfa served as feed for domestic animals; the poor date harvest and lack of fodder led to the sale of livestock.52
In addition to the short- and medium-term hits to household economies, the drought created difficult living conditions and exacerbated infrastructural problems. As the volume of water fell in the falaj, the water contained more dirt, and women had to walk further upstream to get drinking water that was only marginally cleaner. The only other source of drinking water, a shallow well in the wadi, had dried up in the early days of the drought.53
The falaj also suffered. Unsealed channels lost more water to infiltration when underground water in the wadi disappeared. Less flow and more dirt resulted in faster silting. The channel needed to be relined and cleaned, and falaj repair was expensive. The village had already delayed maintenance before the rains stopped. Raising money for repair was even more difficult in the depths of the drought. The longer the people waited, the more difficult the falaj was to repair.54
While some members of the community were optimistic that the rain would eventually return, clouds of pessimism hung over the village. The drought “had broken the spirit of the community, and many had begun to accept an inevitable end to the settlement.” Three families left the community as the drought set in, and many others prepared to do so. In a village of five hundred people, this was a tremendous demographic shift. The people who departed were “some of the most dynamic and astute economically,” so the loss to the community was in disproportion to the number who left.55
Although this example comes from the early 1970s, the fact that the village relied so heavily on the falaj and on irrigation provides important insights into the process a century before. Where the people of Ghayzayn used cash remittances to pay for the water, dates, and alfalfa brought in by land rover, individuals in Nizwa and Manaḥ in the nineteenth century did not have these options. The author of the modern study suggests that people in the past, with fewer options, would have most certainly have taken earlier action to repair the falaj and to protect their crops.56 Judging by the extreme drought in Nizwa in the 1840s, however, the people’s ability to palliate was limited; every aspect of their lives was affected; and departure—if only until the end of the drought—was a ready solution. For example, a half century earlier, during an intense drought in the late eighteenth