History of Zanzibar led to the Anglo-Zanzibar War, also known as the shortest war in history. The islands gained independence from Britain in December 1963 as a constitutional monarchy. A month later, the bloody Zanzibar Revolution, in which several thousand Arabs and Indians were killed and thousands more expelled and expropriated, led to the Republic of Zanzibar and Pemba. That April, the republic merged with the mainland Tanganyika, or more accurately, was subsumed into Tanzania, of which Zanzibar remains a semi-autonomous region. Zanzibar was most recently in the international news with a January 2001 massacre, following contested elections. Zanzibar has been inhabited, perhaps
History of Zanzibar place to this day. The third pillar of the economy was slaves, which gave Zanzibar an important place in the Arab slave trade, the Indian Ocean equivalent of the better-known Triangular Trade. The Omani Sultan of Zanzibar controlled a substantial portion of the African Great Lakes coast, known as Zanj, as well as extensive inland trading routes. Sometimes gradually, sometimes by fits and starts, control of Zanzibar came into the hands of the British Empire. In 1890, Zanzibar became a British protectorate. The death of one sultan and the succession of another of whom the British did not approve later