In 1879 Sayyid Fadl b. Alawi was ousted from his position as ‘Amir of Dhofar’ by a rebellion of tribes that had initially invited him to assume the role due to his Prophetic lineage. Previous accounts of this episode concentrate on the (trans-)regional politics as a background to rebellion or on biographies of the main players. For good reason, “the tribe” itself only appears as a vague collective. This follows usually from the assumption that there would be no way to write about “tribes” without relying exclusively on colonial archives thereby inevitably reproducing an Orientalist gaze. However, environmental historians have taught us that there is a way into the lives of pastoralists and their worlds that can use imperial and colonial archives more effectively and without reproducing their racialized assumptions. In this paper, I will test this method by revisiting the “first” Dhofar rebellion from the perspective of climate change, specifically the globally disastrous El Niño event of the late 1870s. The paper will inquire into the human ecology of Dhofar in relation to the wider Indian Ocean World with the aim of ascertaining the validity of the claims of environmental history in relation to social, political, and cultural history. Do we arrive at a thicker description? Does attention to environmental change add to or change our understanding of basic historical concepts such as agency, region, sovereignty, the political, and so on?