The limitations and assumptions of area studies continue to deepen the stark divisions between Middle East Studies and African Studies today. However, the Red Sea stands as a challenge to this false premise by requiring its researchers to transcend divides between the writing of the history of Africa, the Middle East and the Indian Ocean. Instead of perceiving the Red Sea as a border separating Africa from Arabia or a bridge connecting them, this paper aims to situate the Red Sea region and its histories within a wider world of connections, networks and interactions. To do so, I began with a set of quite specific clues and interpretive puzzles that emerged from a discovery in the Ottoman archives regarding the death of a former French consul at Aden, Henri Lambert (d.1859), on a small island off the coast of the Horn of Africa. The individuals and events surrounding the death of Lambert would open Pandora’s box on the “authority”—a term that indicates something smaller than sovereignty and might reflect better the nature of political realities in the Horn and the Red Sea in the 19th century—issues of Zeila, bringing the Ottomans, the French, the British and local powers together at this historical moment. This was the period in which Muhammed Ali’s reign (r. 1805-1848) brought some stability in the area and consequently led to the revival of the Red Sea trade. Moreover, the volume of oceangoing traffic between India and the Red Sea increased exponentially with the dawn of the steamship area and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Therefore, many powers set their eyes on both sides of the Red Sea. The focus of this paper will be on a local rivalry between two chiefs, Sharmarke (d. 1861), a Somali magnate and merchant, and Abu Bakr (d.1885), an Afar notable and a notorious slave merchant. Both of them were well-entrenched in politics through the Horn of Africa and a variety of trading networks in the Red Sea littoral. Through their trading and political partners in various places ranging from Paris to London, Istanbul to Bombay, I argue that tracing their rivalry over trade and the governorship of the Ottoman-controlled Zeila allows us to surface multiple unexplored connections between local, regional, and global histories in the Red Sea region.