The Omani empire controlled port cities and hinterlands in Arabia and the Persian Gulf; on the Makran Coast; and along the East African littoral. During the first half of the nineteenth century the process of consolidating Omani rule relied upon the movement between and among nodes of empire of a multiethnic cast of characters: Arab princes and traders, Gujarati financiers and petty hawkers, Baluchi merchants and mercenaries, and African laborers and wives, among others. Indeed, one could argue that Muscat became isolated as the margins increasingly constituted the empire. In the latter half of the century, however, British diplomacy and naval power sundered Muscat from Zanzibar and began policing the sea lanes upon which the Omani dominions relied. At the same time, British consular officials oversaw a documentary regime of passes and permissions that simultaneously facilitated and controlled the movement of Africans across the Indian Ocean. Whereas Arabs, Indians, and Baluchis continued to move between and through ports in the region with relative ease, British officials subjected the movement of Africans to a great deal more scrutiny. Yet their consular acts were unable to stamp out mobility, and Arab, Baluchi, and Indian people navigated the burgeoning imperial legal frameworks through subterfuge to move African clients, wives, children, and slaves to Oman, the Makran Coast, and India. Falsified documents, insincere manumissions, and claims of kinship undermined the recent imposition of a British imperial legal framework. This paper scrutinizes labor contracts, ships crews, and consular registries to understand what legitimated African travel and made possible the movement of Africans, especially manumitted slaves, from East Africa to Arabia and India. As such it argues that the same exchanges and migrations that constituted the Omani empire persisted long after British cooptation in both Muscat and Zanzibar. Methodologically this paper is built on close analysis of a variety of archival materials. Sources include consular registers, contracts, letters, and legal cases in Arabic and English from the Zanzibar Archives; correspondence in the Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai; and documents from India Office Records in London.