*PREVIEW* The Anglo-Zanzibar War ft. Riley Quinn

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When it came to like public works in Zanzibar, unfortunately, we didn't have the British people are coming.

I promise things get very stupid very quickly.

But he did also build something called a House of Wonders, which sounds like a barracks for wizards.

Yeah, it sounds like a civilizational bonus in Civ 6.

I think it might be.

If you play as Zanzibar, then you can have the House of Wonders as one of your cultural wonders.

I think that's actually a thing.

But

I know it was on one of them back in the day, but it was called the House of Wonders because it was the first house in Zanzibar to have electricity and an elevator, which is way less cool.

Yeah, I just always play with this Canadians and so six, so no one ever declares war on me.

Is your National Wonder just like the Toronto Maple Leaf Stadium?

Yeah, National Wonder is Toronto Maple Leaf Stadium, and then your civilization becomes unable to win on the sports victory.

That is true.

Yeah, National Wonders will have two.

One is SNC Lavalin, and the other one is the 405.

If you build the SNC Lavalin National Wonder, then there is a 30% chance that a random building in one of your cities will fall down every turn.

If you build the 405 wonder, then all movement speed is halved in your empire.

If you build the Blue Jays Wonder, you cannot win the sports victory.

If you build the Ambassador Bridge Wonder, you just have to deal with a whole bunch of drunken people from Michigan coming over and committing dumb barbarians.

You have to deal with barbarians again in the late game.

Despite all of this, it was during Bargash's rule that things started to go really bad for Zanzibar.

And by that, I mean the Europeans showed back up.

Zanzibar, despite being a pretty small island, all things considered, control a fair amount of the Swahili coast of Eastern Africa, which obviously meant European powers were not going to be super happy about that.

First, there is the wonderfully named Society of German Colonization that strong-armed these Swahili coast people into accepting German protection rather than Zanzibari, and then the Berlin Conference that divvied up swaths of Africa between different colonial regimes.

The Germans and the British both had designs over the area and decided amongst themselves who would get what.

The British would get trading rights over what today would be Kenya, and the Germans would get what is today Tanzania, but minus the island of Zanzibar.

However, the agreement was kind of gray.

Rather than just taking over Zanzibar, like you would imagine an empire would, the agreement forced the Zanzibar government into letting in trading houses run by the German East Africa Company, which is exactly what it sounds like.

We talked a little bit more about this when we did the series on the Namibian genocide, but same kind of slow penetration here, because it's the same reason that the VOC did it in the Netherlands, and the same reason why the British East India Company did it is like, we're going to privatize these ventures until they become profitable, and then the state will take them over.

And the Germans' case, it failed hilariously.

And the Germans say it had taken over pretty quickly after colonization started.

But before long, the British began to muscle in on the Zanzibari with the first thing of being to force them to abandon their slave trade.

And I know that is a good thing.

But they did this for not good reasons.

Despite the banning of slavery being a good thing, the British did it to just destroy the Zanzibari economy and make them more dependent on the British.

No, no, no.

I think we did it because we always had,

we have always lived the principles of classical liberalism, and we were actually fighting the reverse racism of the

we decided that the Zanzibaris doing it was DEI, and we had to get rid of that.

British East India Company DEI is somehow the most cursed thing that's ever been birthed on this show.

I mean, to be fair, though, to be fair, British East India DEI is basically the company under Warren Hastings.

That's like these guys were

like that under Hastings, the East India Company was like, they were really, they like had a very strange and paternalistic love specifically of like the Mughal culture.

It was like, it was insanely fucked up, but like they were,

they were all trying to like be Lawrence of Arabia, but while they were trying to be what Lawrence of Arabia would eventually become, weirdly.

They wanted to be Lawrence of Arabia, but they couldn't get a boner when they got whipped.

There's an extent to which it just feels like this always seems to happen that a certain type of British guy, you take him out of Britain in the 19th century and expose him to temperatures above 30 centigrade over like a prolonged period of time, and he just becomes a weeb for Islam.

Like, it really is a thing.

Like, it's very, very weird, but it's a thing.

Ah, yes, British photosynthesis.

Every British person is about seven average degrees away from

receiving the light of Islam.

Yeah, exactly.

I'm saying from just.

So basically what we're saying is climate change is going to basically

make the caliphate clean.

Yeah, the Emirate of Zanzibar is coming back.

It's just moving north and west.

And this year, when there's a heat wave of the UK and the power grid eventually can't handle all the AC, everyone's just going to simultaneously say the Shahada.

Joe, Joe, Joe, Joe.

AC.

Yeah, AC is not really a theory sense.

None of that.

It's not here either.

Yeah, it's not here either.

But it also doesn't get hot.

I definitely don't have air conditioning in anything.

I know you definitely don't have air conditioning in that studio because we had the one rare hot weekend when we were there last July.

It was the one weekend.

It got over 30, and that's when everyone on the show decided to come to the Netherlands to build the studio.

I was like, don't worry, guys.

It's never hot here.

You might want to pack a jacket, though.

And now we're all Muslim.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, exactly.

We decided to cool off by jumping into the trash bin full of water.

And technically, that's wudu.

That's abuses.

More than that, though, their farming and plantations that did exist in Zanzibar did depend on a slave-based workforce.

The British knew this, and by kneecapping them, they would weaken Zanzibar and weaken the Sultanate and slowly allow them to get muscled more and more.

Bargash, obviously not wanting to fight the Brits, outlawed the slave trade, but simultaneously turned a blind eye to the massive black market trade for slaves that popped up afterwards, which only pissed the Brits off more.

By this point, Bargash was forced to allow more and more British influence into his government.

Trading houses popped up, and before long, British officers were instructing the Zanzibari army, which previously did not exist.

The Zanzibari army was effectively a creation of the British.

Then he died, leaving the Sultanate to another younger brother, Khalifa, who spent the last few years in prison for trying to plot to overthrow his brother.

We call that winning by default.

Again, you can't just imprison your plotting brother.

That's not not how sultanates work.

Otherwise, this shit happens.

You got to strangle him or blind him.

There's no other way to do it.

Also, I do love that it's like the British just love going to states in and around the Gulf and then just making them an army.

Like we, like, that's that, like, Al Yama.

Like, we've been doing that since, uh, not just since Al Yamama, but since way before.

In fact, a lot of telegraph nomads actually work for the Lee Enfield Company maintaining bolt action rifles.

Weirdly, that is still true today.

There's a lot of,

let's call them,

telegraph nomads of the 21st century, digital nomads

that are all like generals in the UAE's military.

And they're like retired colonels from the U.S.

or the UK.

One of them is in charge of their special forces.

Yeah, one of the most senior ones is like a retired Australian general.

I love UAE special forces.

It's like we're stacking up 10 deep and we're going to breach and and clear this store of all of its Louis Vuitton belts.

Yeah, you have to put everyone stands in the door and then immediately like pushes a button that causes just like a complete scorched earth strike on the same building.

They're like, well, you can't just walk in.

Or it's just like 10 Emirati Special Forces guys stack up on a door and then they call in just like 10 guest workers to open it.

That's probably what would happen.

I had actually worked with soldiers from the UAE during one of my tours in Afghanistan, and they never did shit.

They refused to do anything.

And the officers were all Emirati.

They were anti-imperialist United Army Army.

Yeah, like I was jealous.

Their officers were all Emirati, and they refused to listen to anybody, and their soldiers were not.

And their soldiers were like, well, our officers say we can't go, so we're not going.

It's like the

briefing scene in Sicario, where they're just like, all right, Delta, stand up.

Yo, U.S.

Marshals, stand up.

It's like, all right, Emirati Special Forces, stay seated.

Yeah, we actually need six workers to pull us up to our feet.

Yeah, I mean, I was going to say,

as regards this story, Khalifa, it must have been very confusing.

He kind of like lived in a quantum state because technically speaking, he needs to reside in both the disfavored brother's wing of the house and the scheming vizier's wing of the house.

And it's like,

which do you belong to?

He was in prison.

So

they took care of that for him.

That's an additional wing on the house, too.

Yeah, that's the yeah.

His brother put him in prison, and then his brother died, and then like the people that like the sultan's aides showed up, like, well, you won by default, man.

You're sultan now.

Come on in, yeah.