Jonathan Parry - Promised Lands: The British and the Ottoman Middle East

Princeton University Press:

Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 showed how vulnerable India was to attack by France and Russia. It forced the British Empire to try to secure the two routes that a European might use to reach the subcontinent—through Egypt and the Red Sea, and through Baghdad and the Persian Gulf. Promised Lands is a panoramic history of this vibrant and explosive age.

Charting the development of Britain’s political interest in the Middle East from the Napoleonic Wars to the Crimean War in the 1850s, Jonathan Parry examines the various strategies employed by British and Indian officials, describing how they sought influence with local Arabs, Mamluks, Kurds, Christians, and Jews. He tells a story of commercial and naval power—boosted by the arrival of steamships in the 1830s—and discusses how classical and biblical history fed into British visions of what these lands might become. The region was subject to the Ottoman Empire, yet the sultan’s grip on it appeared weak. Should Ottoman claims to sovereignty be recognised and exploited, or ignored and opposed? Could the Sultan’s government be made to support British objectives, or would it always favour France or Russia?

Promised Lands shows how what started as a geopolitical contest became a drama about diplomatic competition, religion, race, and the unforeseen consequences of history. 

Jonathan Parry is professor of modern British history at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Pembroke College. His books include The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity, and Europe, 1830–1886. He is a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books. Twitter @JonParryHis

An excerpt from, “Promised Lands: The British and the Ottoman Middle East” By Jonathan Parry (via Google Books), Pg. 7 – 12:

This book explores the strategies and visions adopted by British officials and commentators towards the Ottoman Middle East—towards the lands themselves, and towards the empire that had ultimate authority over them. There were diverse perspectives on most key issues. This diversity was partly ideo-logical and partly geographical: the view was usually different from London, Bombay, and Constantinople. More importantly still, British officials in Egypt, Syria, and Baghdad all had different outlooks and agendas from those of the Constantinople embassy with which they had to communicate. So at many points this is a story of competing opinions about national interests and the best ways of promoting them. There may be parts of the nineteenth-century world for which simple, uniform generalisations about British “imperialism” are sustainable, but the Middle East was not one of them. The policy of the Foreign Office emerged out of a dialogue between centre and locality—a dialogue in which the Indian government’s voice also featured inconsistently. The foreign secretary was most comfortable in imposing policy on British ambas-sadors and consuls when that policy was not simply “British,” but had been agreed with representatives of some of the continental powers. When this was not the case, local men were usually given more latitude. Often they took it whether they were given it or not.

Some of these visions involved the application of coherent principles. On the other hand, one sub-theme of the book is that individuals frequently talked up British objectives in one or other remote part of the Middle East in order to secure a posting, and a career, for themselves. The risk of French invasion or Russian aggression may at times have been real, but there was also great scope for British representatives to exaggerate the threat in order to demonstrate their own utility. The national interest was also often a personal interest. As a result, this is a story of individuals much more than it is of abstract economic forces—-which came to matter seriously in Middle Eastern policy only after 1860.

The first disagreement, in 1798, was about how much Egypt mattered in a war for control of Europe. Britain’s international position in 1798 was not attractive. The government was preoccupied with finding European allies against Napoleon. This Eurocentric strategy meant downplaying British interests in the Middle East. But Britain lost all its European allies anyway—not an unusual occurrence—and in 1800 the cabinet realised that it was essential to get France out of Egypt. This was done by a strategically unprecedented two-pronged attack, from the Mediterranean, but also from India into the Red Sea. For the next thirty years, the defence of the Middle East, Ottoman and beyond, was left mainly to Indian officials, and in particular to the presidency of Bombay. The Bombay government’s navy, the Bombay Marine, was used to protecting Indian commerce in the Gulf and around Arabia, so it was a natural extension of its function to safeguard these waters against potential European threats. After Britain took Mauritius from France in 1810, these threats greatly diminished anyway. So all the fundamental assumptions about how to defend the Middle East from Britain’s rivals were developed in India, or by the civil servants of the East India Company in London. Until the 1830s, the Foreign Office had not thought much about the Middle East, or indeed India, because it continued to be preoccupied with Europe and with other regions where European powers might challenge British might.

In the 1830s, Indian interests continued to dominate thinking about the Middle East, but perceptions were changed by the introduction of steam power in the Indian Ocean and on the rivers of Mesopotamia. In the latter case, one explicit aim was to pre-empt the threat that Russia might take that route towards India. The other reason for investing in steam in Mesopotamia was the search for a new route for the transport of people, mail, and goods between Britain and India, because of the great practical difficulty of the Red Sea route. In the late 1830s, however, more advanced steam technology made possible the conquest of the Red Sea. Around 1850, plans for a railway across Egypt made the Red Sea route yet more attractive. By the 1850s, reliable and swift communication had brought nineteenth-century material culture to the narrow corridor that the British used for the transit across Egypt. In addi-tion, the ships of the Bombay Marine (renamed the Indian Navy in 1830) secured dominance in the Gulf and maintained a presence on the Mesopo-tamian rivers.

Steam power extended British visions of the region in several ways, which were imported from India in the hope that they could work among the Arabs. Improved communication networks made it easier to move troops and guns about, and thus to use technology to flaunt Britain’s military and economic superiority over feudal Russia or the Ottoman sultan. Steam also promised to help Britain in assisting local authorities to secure order and the rule of law, including the protection of property. As a result, the process of strengthening British authority on the waterways of the Middle East can be compared to the “rage for order” described by Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford for other parts of the early Victorian empire. Some commentators also hoped to persuade the inhabitants to settle by riverbanks and to grasp the mutual benefits of commerce with the passing steamers.

An important group of British politicians, led by William Huskisson and Lord Palmerston, developed a more ambitious link between steam power and commercial development. They were enthusiasts for the idea of freeing British trade from monopolies, prohibitions, and extortionate tariffs, and wanted to apply this to Ottoman lands. In 1825, this had led to the abolition of the Levant Company, the venerable body that had monopolised Anglo-Ottoman trade and had employed local consuls. The hope was that free enterprise and capital investment could revive old land trade routes like the one between Syria and the Gulf. Egypt seemed less promising, because of the bargain that the monopolist pasha Mehmet Ali had made with the remnants of the Levant Company to build up a protectionist economic system. As it happened, Mehmet Ali was himself a great enthusiast for British steam power, and it further entrenched his rule in Egypt. By the 1840s, many British people regarded Egypt as a model for the future economic development of the region. The British now tried to enhance their commercial presence in Baghdad as well.

The same tensions emerged, between those who favoured cooperation with powerful local vested interests and those who hoped for transformative capital investment from outside. In Baghdad, unlike in Egypt, both groups were disappointed.

Thus there was never only one economic policy aim for the Middle East. In the same way, there had been a division of opinion during the Napoleonic Wars, between those who believed that the best way to enhance local respect for Britain was by destructive bombardments of uncooperative Arab trading settlements, and those who hoped instead to build friendship and respect through mutually beneficial commerce. Both were tried in the Red Sea in 1799-1802, but the first was quickly abandoned. The Indian government faced a similar issue in relation to the Gulf, where “pirate” shaykhdoms were shelled in the desperate wartime conditions of 1809, but also in the much less desperate ones of 1819.

The ancient equivalent of steam had been irrigation, which had turned deserts into gardens, until human neglect turned them back again. Most Brit-ish residents and travellers thought about the future of these lands through the prism of their past. Those who had had a classical education remembered particularly the way in which the Greeks and Romans had united Europe and western Asia into prosperous civilisations under the rule of law, and the accounts they had left of the history and geography of these lands. The modern world was the result of the fusion of those classical empires with the Christian religion. The British could not avoid thinking about the Middle East through the same historical lens as the French and Russians. They dreamed of the return of civilisation as they defined it. They regarded Britain as the natural successor and best interpreter of those ancient civilisations. Nearly all were Protestants, and saw the Catholic and Orthodox versions of Christianity as intolerant perversions.

In Britain, one body had a particularly religious perspective on the history of the Middle East: the Church of England. The Church regarded itself as the purest exponent of historical Christianity and the body best suited to reunite other Christian communities, around Anglican Protestantism. In the 1830s and 1840s, leading bishops pressed for Church missions to the “primitive” Churches of the East, which had spent centuries courageously defending their independence from Catholic, Orthodox, and Muslim aggressions. Well-funded evangelical societies also eyed the region because they believed that Islam was about to fall, allowing the word of God to be spread freely. They looked to history to suggest alliances with small groups that could spearhead this evangelism. One of the “primitive” Churches, the Nestorians of Kurdistan, had successfully evangelised across Asia in the past; perhaps they could reprise this role? Alternatively, one approach to reading the Bible suggested that the resettlement and conversion of Jews in their Old Testament lands would usher in the Second Coming of Christ. This book argues that these explicitly Christian domestic visions had little purchase among British officials in the Middle East itself, where there was usually much more tolerance towards Muslim culture. Nonetheless, their power in Britain gave them a brief political impact.

Finally, there were divisions in domestic politics. Until 1830, Britain was governed by a succession of Tory governments. They were concerned to avoid revolution in Europe and to keep down defence spending. So they saw the value of cooperation between the conservative European regimes to maintain the peace. They had no particular plans for the Ottoman Empire, but they hoped that the powers’ aversion to a European war over it would provide adequate security for the defence of India. Tories who had a Eurocentric outlook usually sympathised with the explicit institutional Christianity of continental conservatives, including the Russians. When the Church of England became actively involved in the region around 1840, it, likewise, tentatively sought common ground with the Orthodox Churches, against Roman Catholicism.

In the 1830s, a series of Liberal governments had very different attitudes to domestic politics and to Russia, which they treated as an ideological as well as a geopolitical foe. They used steam and trade to assert British technological modernity in Asia as a way of warning Russia not to advance towards India. This meant a more active approach in the Middle East, as noted above.

In all these calculations, there was rarely much emphasis on upholding the status of the Ottoman Empire. Only the Constantinople embassy was consistently concerned with that. The army and the Indian Navy were much more interested in the practicalities of winning local influence, sometimes in challenging conditions, by gaining the confidence of contending factions and trying to mediate between them. So they were concerned to secure a balance between Ottoman state interests and those of local groups, primarily for political reasons, and sometimes also for moral ones. 

No British government in this period ever guaranteed the Ottoman Empire unilaterally, and before 1840 none attempted a special relationship with it. They assumed that common European action was the only way of securing the empire, while they doubted its capacity for independence in the face of Rus-sia’s use of pressure to win influence at the Porte. The European diplomatic crisis of 1839-40 over the future of the Ottoman Empire improved its security, and therefore its prospects, but did not resolve the issue of whether it could be saved from dominant Russian influence.

The Tory government of 1841-46 still preferred to pursue stability in the East by getting the five European powers to agree to any adjustments in Otto-man ruling arrangements. This meant working with Russia and Austria to a much greater degree than Liberal governments wanted to do. It also aimed at cooperation with France, on a joint policy to press the Porte to keep its word to look after all oppressed religious minorities. One aim of this policy was to restore good relations with France after the 1839-40 crisis. The other aim was to position both countries behind a group of ministers at Constantinople who had recently unveiled their own vision of law-based government founded on the principle of security for all interests and religions, usually known as the Tanzimat. This was also how the British thought they governed India.

When the Liberals returned to power in 1846 they dramatically increased the stakes, arguing that the Ottomans should remove the bias in their legal system that favoured Muslims over others. They hoped that this would remove most grievances of Orthodox Christians, and undercut the Russian strategy of exploiting those grievances in order to maintain primacy at the Porte. Therefore, a strategy emerged that tried to unite Britain, France, and Tanzimat-minded Ottoman ministers behind the principle of legal equality among religions. In advocating it, Palmerston and Lord John Russell had wider ambitions: to reshape the European Concert around Anglo-French liberal values. That would help to pen in Russia across Eurasia. The aftermath of the 1848 revolutions made this approach doubly attractive. The Ottoman Empire now became a liberal project, and we can begin to talk of a liberal approach to empire. There were two difficulties with this strategy. One was that France was still tempted by its old policy of prioritising the interests of the Catholic Church at times of crisis; Napoleon III’s international aspirations increased French assertiveness. The other was that Russia seemed determined still to support the grievances of the Ottomans’ Orthodox subjects. The Crimean War emerged from this situation. It was only the war’s outcome that allowed the British liberal project to develop, for the next few years at least.

Pg. 80 – 82:

WHEN LORD ELGIN left Constantinople in 1803, one reason was to alert badly informed ministers in London to “the increasing interest we daily acquire in the eastern provinces of Turkey and Persia.” The main eastern Ottoman prov-ince was the pashalik of Baghdad. Its capital city was the centre of road and river communications to the Persian Gulf, Persia, Syria, and Kurdistan, and a great Asian commercial mart. No Ottoman town east of the Levant could match Baghdad’s strategic, political, and economic importance. It was only a few miles from the site of the great historic civilisation of Babylon. Alexander the Great had swept past Babylon during his war against the Persians, before his victories at Susa and Persepolis, on his way to India. When the French took Egypt in 1798, many expected them to follow his route through Syria to the upper Tigris and down the river towards the Gulf. Henry Dundas, brooding on Alexander’s example, was persuaded by a member of his network, Harford Jones, that Jones should go to Baghdad in 1798 as a government agent, to turn local opinion against the French. France had recently sent agents and a consul to the city. As already noted, Dundas’s men were realists, for whom money and power were the best tools for winning friends in the East. Jones knew Baghdad and its Indian trading links well; he had been assistant East India Company (EIC) agent at Basra at the head of the Gulf for a decade from 1783. His new mission aimed to engage “the secret efforts of the Arabs and Pashaws on the eastern and southern frontiers of the empire. These from their connec-tion with India may be brought, some by money, some by threats and some by promises heartily to enter into our cause.” Dundas and Jones were confident that British commercial and naval power could overawe local factions and build a lasting influence by mediating judiciously between them. This would be easier in the Gulf region than in Egypt, because no European rival matched Britain’s naval position in the Indian Ocean.

British officials in Bombay, meanwhile, valued the Gulf mainly for its extensive trade, on which their revenues relied. The EIC stationed agents on the Gulf coast at Persian Bushehr and Ottoman Basra, and sometimes also at Muscat just to the east of the Gulf. It had founded a factory at Basra in 1763, its first in Ottoman territory, in order to develop the Gulf trade and the overland government mail route from there to Aleppo and the Mediterranean. Its main resident at Basra from 1784 to 1806 was Samuel Manesty, son of a Liverpool slave trader, who became the dominant British figure in the Gulf by building extensive trade networks with Bombay and marrying into the local Armenian merchant community (his wife was a date-plantation heiress). Manesty was an enthusiastic operator of the beratli protection system that Britain’s Constantinople ambassadors found distasteful, but which he used to extend his patronage empire among wealthy locals. Manesty epitomised the policy of prioritising commercial advantages for himself and his Armenian friends, and so made a lot of enemies, including Ambassador Liston at Constantinople, and his erstwhile assistant, Jones. Nonetheless, his hard-headed approach to making the British residency a financial power facilitated political understandings with those who mattered in the region-including the Wahhabi and other Arab tribes.

The Indian government in Calcutta was also concerned about the region, and especially the potential role of Persia in any European attack on India—by France or by Russia, which was manifestly extending its informal influence in northern Persia. India consistently tried to counter European influence in Persia by its own diplomacy there. This diplomacy was often as preoccupied with the Gulf as with Persia itself. In 1799, Governor-General Wellesley appointed his protégé Captain John Malcolm as envoy to the court of Persia, hoping to bind the shah to Indian objectives. On his way, Malcolm visited Muscat, where he courted the local imam, and then the Bushehr residency, from where he reported on the state of trade with India in February 1800. He argued for a permanent British military and commercial presence in the Gulf, preferably on the island of Qishm, by the straits of Hormuz.

The idea of possessing an island in the Gulf-Qishm, or Hormuz, or Kharaq further north, near Bushehr-was to be a demand of the “Malcolmite” school of British Indian strategists for the next half-century. Though this island strategy was always contentious, the underlying argument for a strong British naval presence in the Gulf was not. Malcolm’s argument was commercial, but more fundamentally political. The commerce between India and the Gulf, for foodstuffs and manufactures, was so great and promising that it was indispensable for Indian prosperity and stability. The EIC must protect it, develop it, and “excite a liberal spirit of commercial enterprize and adventure” in its Indian population. For the same reasons, that commerce was bound to be attractive to France and Russia. France’s conquest of Egypt had shown the inability of the Ottoman Empire to act as “a barrier between India & Europe.” The British needed to become the dominant power in the Gulf, in order to apply counter-pressure on Persia, and on Basra and Baghdad, which were “more immediately dependent on the trade with India… for their very existence.” The pasha of Baghdad must be told that to take sides against Brit-ain would be to sacrifice “the trade on which [his] prosperity depended.” EIC protection of lives and property should be more attractive to local merchants, rulers, and tribal chiefs than the capricious and venal rule of Ottoman or Per-sian overlords. After the 1807 Treaty of Tilsit suggested that France or Russia or both were likely to move against Britain in the East, this argument became more urgent.

Between 1798 and 1821, British policy in this region was in the hands of the Dundasite Jones and then the Malcolmite Claudius Rich at Baghdad, and Samuel Manesty at Basra, together with a succession of figures at Bushehr and Bombay who worried about the security of British trade in the Gulf, which seemed threatened by “pirate” tribes in alliance with the Wahhabi. Their subtly different perspectives help to explain occasional variations in policy. Yet those differences were greatly outweighed by their agreement—that strengthening Britain’s presence was a priority strategically, and for their own careers. Moreover, this must be done irrespective of any concerns of the Ottoman ministers at Constantinople, who were of only slightly more importance in Baghdad than they were in Egypt. Britain must use naval and commercial power, and a reputation for fair dealing, to build up influence with local chiefs and become indispensable to the regional political balance.