The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 inaugurated a new “choke point” in global mobility, both accelerating and decelerating connectivity, as Vaselka Huber (2013) has argued, between the Mediterranean and Red Seas. By the early 20th century, such acceleration and deceleration had become standardized, albeit hardly equal or always smooth as various disruptions to the management of access continued. As steamship lines from the UK to South Africa and the UK to India also expanded through the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, along with intermediary stops, British officials, merchants, documents, and voyagers could, in general, more easily travel. At the same time, Omanis, for example, were more limited since the steamships (known colloquially by mid-twentieth century as “mayl” as they transported mail), while seemingly safer and faster, were also more easily controlled: they needed larger docks at port and the shipping companies were more willing to heed official British demands throughout the Indian Ocean for travel permits. Recognizing the uneven and simultaneous acceleration and deceleration of oceanic travel at the beginning of the 20th century, this paper focuses on the “choke point” of Zanzibar harbor not only as an oceanic cross-road of imperial – British, French, German, and Omani – power struggles and negotiations from both Europe and the Arabian Peninsula or an emerging sociality of humans and non-humans, but also as a site from which the bounds and contradictions of territorial sovereignty were reinforced. Indeed, as this paper explores, in the aftermath of the 1964 revolution, as thousands of Omanis attempted to flee to the Arabian Peninsula or London (through the Suez Canal), the limits of global mobility, as well as the means of circumventing such limits, became immediately and profoundly apparent.