Although archaeologists have found the remains of small 15th century settlements on the bluffs just north of Pangani, the modern town came to prominence in the nineteenth century, when, under nominal Zanzibari rule, it was a major terminus of caravan routes to the deep interior. From the 1860s onward townspeople established large plantations of sugar and coconut in Mauya, along the banks of the river just west of town. The plantations were worked by slave labor, and Pangani also became an important center of the slave trade, shipping captives taken in the wars attendant on the collapse of the Shambaa kingdom in the Usambara mountains to the plantations of Pemba and Zanzibar. After the Sultan of Zanzibar signed treaties with Great Britain outlawing the ocean-going trade in slaves in 1873, Pangani became a center for smuggling slaves across the narrow channel to Pemba, in evasion of British warships. Pangani, 2019