1. This was a world of sailing ships, large ocean-going dhows, and smaller coasting vessels. The monsoon wind system still facilitated and constrained maritime trade in the Indian Ocean basin, just as it had for two millennia. British and French commerce and naval power had displaced that of the Portuguese (who remained in Goa, India however). After the Omanis expelled the Portuguese from Muscat in 1650, they helped the Swahili towns of East Africa in their struggle to extricate themselves from the Portuguese yoke. For Arab and Indian traders, Portugal's decline was the return to older patterns of trade. In the western Indian Ocean basin, these patterns favored Oman because Muscat was well-placed to dominate the Persian Gulf. Trade with India increased steadily, Omani merchants prospered, and Oman emerged as a key player in the Indian Ocean trade. This created considerable anxiety among the system's European players, and the British treaty with Oman in 1799 reflects this anxiety. The British, of course, wanted to protect their interests in India. Mercantile rivalry between Britain and France, played out globally in the eighteenth century, and provides a larger context for relations among Europeans, Indians, Arabs, and Africans in the Indian Ocean system. In the decades after 1760, France was losing out to Britain, specifically in India. The French then turned their attention to the French East India Company's islands off the coast of Madagascar where they had developed sugar plantations in the 1740s with slaves obtained from Madagascar. When these plantations, as well as the French plantations in the French West Indies, required more labor, the French went looking for slaves on the East African coast. When French traders came to Kilwa seeking slaves, they gave a major boost to Kilwa's slave export trade. The ruler of Oman wanted to tax this trade, so he tried to exert more control over Kilwa. Also, Omani prosperity had generated a greater demand for slaves in Oman itself, where slaves worked on date plantations, crewed ships, and served as domestics. This expansion of maritime trade on the East Coast was centered on Kilwa from the 1770s to 1790s, but it initiated a process that came to full fruition in Zanzibar in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the 1780s, Zanzibar was the only part of the East Coast loyal to Oman, but Omani traders recognized its potential. Another critical enabling factor was the Industrial Revolution in the West. British textile mills were already producing cheap cloth for export to overseas markets. European prosperity would soon create a desire for luxury goods that included an almost insatiable demand for ivory. Thus, several factors that would shape eastern Africa's integration into the world economy during the nineteenth century were in place by the turn of the century. The Omani-European Rivalry in the Indian Ocean: Competition over trade routes 1.How did Oman’s location benefit their Middle Eastern trade? And more broadly, Indian Ocean trade? 2.Why were the Omanis so concerned with having a presence on the Swahili coast? 3.Oman’s early influence increased with the weakening of which European power? 4.Which Swahili state benefitted from the French slave trade? 5.Which island off the Swahili coast became the Omani economic center? 6.Which European nation increased its power & influence in the Indian Ocean during this period? 7.Which luxury item drove economic activity in East Africa?