1830s–1856: (Sultan Seyyid Said and the Building of the Zanzibar Commercial Empire — Moving the Capital to Zanzibar in the 1830s, Organizing Merchant Immigra…

1830s–1856: (Sultan Seyyid Said and the Building of the Zanzibar Commercial Empire — Moving the Capital to Zanzibar in the 1830s, Organizing Merchant Immigrants for Interior Penetration, Caravans Reaching the Great Lakes by the 1840s, and Zanzibar’s Dominance Until the European Partition of the 1880s): The Omani sultans began to assert their authority more vigorously toward the end of the eighteenth century, with a view to capitalizing on the burgeoning Indian Ocean commerce — and the base of Omani expansion was the island of Zanzibar. The process is particularly associated with Sultan Seyyid Said, the energetic potentate who in the 1830s moved his capital to Zanzibar permanently. Under him, the Omani–Zanzibari sphere of influence increased substantially and began to penetrate beyond the coast into the interior — he organized both local and newly arrived merchant immigrants for economic exploitation of the interior, and Zanzibari caravans had reached Lakes Victoria and Tanganyika by the end of the 1840s. When Seyyid died in 1856, his domains were split in two, and Oman and Zanzibar became effectively independent of one another. The government of Zanzibar strove to control the entire East African trade network along the coast of modern Kenya and Tanzania, and Zanzibar became the dominant force in East African commerce until the 1880s, when the European partition destroyed its sovereignty.