1 - Sultan Uthman’s Salvage Agreements

Summary

The first part of this chapter examines deep-rooted, diplomatic traditions of courtly exchange, international coexistence and commercial cooperation centred around the Majerteen Sultanate in north-eastern Somalia. A network of regional diplomacy first emerged for the purposes of managing shipwrecks and facilitating trade during the Egyptian Middle Kingdom. The Majerteen Sultanate emerged in the eighteenth century and played a critical role in the north-east Africa’s foreign affairs, presiding over a cooperative system of international relations which promoted domestic political stability and protected maritime commerce. Having reconstructed the contours of a regional culture of maritime law and international relations, the second part of the chapter tells the story of the first contacts between Majerteenia and British colonists, a few years after the East India Company’s settlement of the port of Aden in 1839. Early Anglo-Majerteen interactions mirrored the well-established regional model of diplomacy, in which regional rulers created alliances and offered one another mutual recognition as sovereigns. But as the century wore on, British officials became increasingly belligerent; the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the increase in steam traffic tested international relations and the regional maritime framework.