In the 1950s, Arabs constituted as much as one-quarter of Zanzibar’s population—one of the highest proportions in sub-Saharan Africa. Within a decade, anti-Arab violence and forced migration had radically remade that demographic landscape. In Zanzibar Was a Country: Exile and Citizenship between East Africa and the Gulf, Nathaniel Mathews offers an incisive, archivally grounded account of how Zanzibar persisted as a portable legal, political, and affective project among those displaced by the 1964 revolution. His central claim is that Zanzibar “was a country” not only as a territorial polity but also as a project reconstituted through bureaucratic regimes and diasporic networks linking East Africa and the Gulf.

Mathews organizes the study into three parts: “Belonging in Zanzibar,” “Belonging in Diaspora,” and “Belonging in Oman.” This tripartite architecture stages the trajectory of his subjects—Zanzibaris of Arab descent—across revolution, displacement, and return migration. Building on Jonathon Glassman’s scholarship and drawing on Charles Tilly’s critique of the nation–state as a container, Mathews situates Zanzibar within the global mid-twentieth-century transition from imperial subjecthood to national citizenship. He frames the post-1945 moment as one of developmental sovereignty—a form of sovereignty in which citizenship is tied to state-led development, protection, and distribution within export-oriented economies. The Indian Ocean’s economic reorientation, from mercantile circuits to hydrocarbons, reweighted the value of different passports and made Gulf monarchies uniquely capable of selective incorporation. This macroeconomic framing is one of the book’s major interventions, situating the fate of displaced Zanzibaris at the intersection of revolutionary violence and the political economy of oil.

The book offers a tightly integrated history of how belonging for Zanzibaris of Arab descent was made and unmade across law, violence, exile, and return. Mathews distinguishes historical, early modern/modern, and incipient post-1945 diasporas. He begins in the late-colonial period, showing how the 1952 Nationality Decree and the language of exogenous origins turned immigration status and ancestry into weapons in the rivalry between the Zanzibar Nationalist Party and the Afro-Shirazi Party. Voter registration, naturalization drives, court challenges such as the 1957 case against Abeid Karume, and the elections of 1961 and 1963 appear as racialized, procedural arenas in which the very category of “Zanzibari” was fractured well before the 1964 revolution. From there, Mathews reconstructs the revolution and its aftermath in humanizing and granular detail, combining oral histories with International Committee of the Red Cross, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and British Red Cross archives to track how violence, evacuation logistics, and paperwork produced a demographic rupture. Poorer immigrant rural Omanis (known locally as the Manga) emerge as especially exposed, unsettling narratives that reduce the upheaval to a reckoning with a uniformly wealthy Arab elite. Red Cross flights, clandestine dhow departures, and new identification regimes—including the two-month rule that stripped citizenship from those who fled—reduced an Arab population of around fifty thousand in 1963 to perhaps twelve to fifteen thousand by the end of 1964, generating death, detention, and widespread statelessness.

The analysis then follows Zanzibaris into exile in the Gulf, tracing how organizations such as the Zanzibar Organization and its newsletter Free Zanzibar Voice constructed a diasporic public sphere that combined humanitarian advocacy with shifting, sometimes conspiratorial, Cold War–era politics. Mathews complements this with a fine-grained account of refugee handling in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha, and elsewhere, where UNHCR and local authorities favored individualized solutions over group naturalization. Cases such as the Rashidiyya housing scheme in Dubai exemplify forms of pragmatic incorporation without full political membership, while illustrating how everyday sovereignty was enacted through paperwork.

Finally, the book turns to Oman to chart a sociolegal history of “ethnic return migration.” Sultan Qaboos’s post-1970 reforms and the 1972 Nationality Law opened a path for East African Omanis to claim nationality through paternal descent, tribal vetting, and bureaucratic retribalization, even as 1983 amendments tightened residency and language requirements in ways that especially constrained women and multinational households. Citizenship law appears here as both a development tool and ethnic boundary, shaped by oil downturns and nationalist anxiety. Mathews closes by examining Omani-Zanzibari memoirs, novels, and digital archives that revisit revolution (often referring to it as inqilāb, or “coup,” rather than thawra, or “revolution”), slavery, and the 1964 union with Tanganyika through tropes of exceptionalism and selective evidence. His critique of the uncritical recycling of stills from the 1966 film Africa Addio underlines a broader argument: diaspora memory must be read as an active political project that can harden fragile claims into dogma, even as it remains an indispensable archive of how communities narrate loss and belonging.

As with any groundbreaking book, there are limits when it comes to uncharted histories. Mathews labels the notion of an Omani empire “a modern anachronism,” on the grounds that “there is no language from Seyyid Said’s time in which he refers to his domains as such” (167). Yet historians routinely deploy “empire” in their conceptualization of early modern formations, such as the Mughal or Portuguese empires, irrespective of whether contemporaries preferred saltanat (sultanate), reino (kingdom), or domínios ultramarinos (overseas dominions) over império (empire) before the nineteenth century. The absence of self-designation does not deprive a category of analytical purchase. Indeed, Mathews—drawing on Engseng Ho—himself deploys muwalladūn, an etic category, for locally born, Afro-Arab, Omani-descended elites in Zanzibar: a middle- and upper-class, colonially educated, increasingly “caste-like” creole stratum that emerges as the core “sons of the soil” and driving force of territorial Zanzibari nationalism. In Omani Ibadi legal sources, by contrast, al‑muwalladūn typically designates second- or later-generation descendants of imported slaves, whose social and legal classification ran through locality and patronage rather than a generic marker of racial mixture.

By eschewing an imperial frame, Mathews leaves both Gwadar—merely 173 nautical miles from Oman and incorporated into the Busaidi Omani empire before Zanzibar (1783–1958)—and the substantially larger Baloch component in Oman, itself significant in Zanzibar’s multiethnic society, with no connected or comparative attention beyond a cartographic or passing mention. An imperial frame would cut against the usual insularity of diaspora studies, foregrounding these Indian Ocean entanglements and clarifying how Arab-ness and Omani-ness were forged through inclusion and exclusion across multiple littorals, above all in the racialized and tribalized stratification of Omani citizenship among East African, Arab, and Baloch populations. The transition from an Indian Ocean empire to an Arab nation–state was not only administrative but also epistemic. It redefined who counted as “Omani.” Engagement with empire as an analytical category would have sharpened Mathews’ insights into how race, paternal ancestry, language, and tribal affiliation were resignified and mobilized to delimit belonging in the post-1970 era.

These lacunae do not eclipse the force of this deservedly Monsoon Prize-winning book. It shifts the field beyond event history to the procedures—camp lists, ship manifests, nationality clauses, identity cards—through which sovereignty and belonging were actually made and lived. Analytically, it shows nationalism as an interlocking set of territorial, ethnic, and developmental projects, and it provincializes the nation-state by centering diasporic social worlds. Methodologically, it offers a reflexive reading of vernacular sources, neither romanticizing community memory nor dismissing it, and sutures Arabic and Kiswahili materials to international humanitarian archives with care. It is also very teachable: the introduction and chapter 2 give students a material sense of how revolutions generate refugee paperwork; chapter 4 fits courses on Gulf migration; chapter 5 serves seminars on comparative nationality law; and chapter 6 anchors discussions of heritage and memory.

This is a field-shaping study that compels scholars of East Africa, the Gulf, and the Indian Ocean to rethink decolonization as both diasporic and documentary, and to recognize that belonging in and after empire was crafted as much in the ordinary terror of paperwork and borders as in revolutionary streets and the contested terrain of memory.