The Shortest War in History

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

History

4.7 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 26 August 2021

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

On 27 August 1896, the British Empire went to war with the Zanzibar Sultanate for approximately 38 minutes! It is the shortest war in history. It came about after the death of the pro-British Sultan Hamad bin Thuwaini and his replacement by Sultan Khalid bin Barghash who favoured German interests in the region. With the commencement of hostilities, British warships bombarded the Sultan's palace cause extensive damage and over 500 casualties. Despite its brevity, the conflict is important as it marked the beginning of a major shift in the power dynamic between the industrialized West and the soon to be colonized world. To set the Anglo-Zanzibar war in its proper context Dan is joined by Dr Erik Gilbert from Arkansas State University. Erik explains what happened in those fateful minutes at the end of the nineteenth century, the importance of technology in the conflict and how it signalled the start of the Scramble for Africa.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hey folks, welcome to Dan's Note's History in the 27th August, 1896. The shortest war
0:07.2	in history took place. Not obvious, it's a slightly imperfect designation, but we think
0:11.6	it's the shortest declared war between two kind of nation states sovereign entities in history.
0:19.0	It was between Britain and British Empire at its apogee and the state of Zanzibar, a small
0:26.2	island off the east coast of Africa. The death of a pro-British sultan precipitated a crisis
0:33.7	of succession. Britain's preferred candidate to the throne was not made sultan. Instead,
0:39.2	had it been bargash became sultan who seemed to be more favourable to the Germans who were also
0:46.0	increasing their presence in East Africa. As a result, the British sent in the gunboats.
0:52.4	They opened fire on the Royal Palace at 9am. High explosive shells fell around the palace,
0:57.6	smashing it up, the sultan fled and by 946 the firing stopped. So it lasted around 45 minutes,
1:05.2	the shortest recorded war in history. So we thought we'd mark that conflict today on the
1:11.3	podcast and we were just obviously why was there a flare-up of violence in Zanzibar in the 8th,
1:16.7	19th century, but it was a good chance to also talk about the mismatch opened up between
1:21.6	British, European and African powers at this point. Thanks to technological transformation that
1:26.7	was sweeping the world and also about a scramble for Africa. It pitted European powers against
1:32.4	it and they carved up the continent and subsumed once powerful entities like Zanzibar
1:37.6	sultanate with such ease. It's such a fascinating topic and I had Dr. Eric Gilmatt talk to
1:42.9	reality. He is a professor of history at Arkansas State University. He is an expert in the Indian
1:48.8	Ocean which actually everybody is the most important ocean in history. We'll do another podcast
1:53.7	in this one day but it's really the ocean where everything happens. You can have to take it from
1:58.0	me for today but maybe I'll talk to Eric again. We discussed the importance of Indian Ocean,
2:02.1	the history of the human race. In fact that would make a TV documentary, an history of TV,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from History Hit, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of History Hit and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.