British Imperialism in Qajar Iran

Consuls, Agents and Influence in the Middle East

H. Lyman Stebbins

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781786720986
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Kolonialismus & Postkolonialismus

In 1888, there were just four British consulates in the country; by 1921 there were twenty-three. H. Lyman Stebbins investigates the development and consequences of British imperialism in Iran in a time of international rivalry, revolution and world war. While previous narratives of Anglo-Iranian relations have focused on the highest diplomatic circles in Tehran, London, Calcutta and St. Petersburg, this book argues that British consuls and political agents made the vast southern borderlands of Iran the real centre of British power and influence during this period. Based on British consular archives from Bushihr, Shiraz, Sistan and Muhammarah, this book reveals that Britain, India and Iran were linked together by discourses of colonial knowledge and patterns of political, military and economic control. It also contextualizes the emergence of Iranian nationalism as well as the failure and collapse of the Qajar state during the Iranian Constitutional Revolution and the First World War.

PART I

CONSULS AND THE GREAT GAME, 1889–1907

CHAPTER 1

IMPERIAL INTELLIGENCE: OFFICIAL BRITISH IMAGES OF QAJAR IRAN

In a word, I shall endeavour to do here for Persia what abler writers have done for most other countries of equal importance, but what for two hundred years no single English writer has essayed to do for Iran, viz. to present a full-length and life-size portrait of that kingdom.¹

Lord Curzon's Persia and the Persian Question did indeed take up an immense canvas – two volumes and almost 1,300 pages describing his journey through Iran from late 1889 to early 1890 and analysing the country's political and economic institutions through the prism of Indian security. Curzon was confident he had produced the definitive work on modern Iran, and this expertise contributed to his appointment as Viceroy of India (1899–1905). His volumes, nevertheless, proved rather more a beginning than an end of Britain's quest to acquire knowledge about late Qajar Iran; he had sketched, not solved, the ‘Persian Question’. His encyclopaedic presentation revealed the scope as well as the limits of British knowledge about Qajar Iran, especially the geostrategic southern provinces that he only briefly visited. Over the next two decades, this ignorance caused Curzon and his colleagues much anxiety as they learned of the double menace of Russian efforts to advance towards the Persian Gulf and the growing inability of the Qajar state to govern its vast periphery. In response to such knowledge ‘panics’,² Britain constructed political, commercial and intelligence networks in Iran manned by consuls and political officers. Curzon himself selected several of these political officers from India's Foreign Department while he was viceroy. These men were the Raj's diplomatic corps, serving as British representatives at the courts of India's native princes as well as of foreign rulers beyond the frontier in Central Asia and the Middle East.³ In southern Iran, their mission was to check Russian influence and to collect and classify various kinds of imperial information, so as to render visible this extensive region and its inhabitants.

Crossing the Iranian frontier meant entering another state and another ‘information order’,⁴ and British officials used three main methods to attempt to penetrate both. The first was political intelligence directed at comprehending the structure of the Qajar state and identifying and co-opting the individuals and networks through which it functioned. The second was mapping, which took two forms: first, a geostrategic discourse that located Iran in the shrinking space between Britain's and Russia's imperial borderlands and served to chart the British Empire's political frontiers (as distinct from its territorial frontiers) by way of spheres of influence and schemes of partition; and, second, a cartographic description of that space through gazetteers, route books and trigonometric surveys that aspired to scientific veracity and military utility. The final method of knowing Qajar Iran was commercial statistics, which although plagued by inaccuracies, at least offered British officers a numerical measure of their economic and political influence vis-à-vis their Russian rivals. These political, geographical and commercial modes overlapped to shape an image of Qajar Iran that was dominated by Indian security and a compulsion to assert, measure and verify British interests and influence. While economic penetration has long been viewed by historians as the hallmark of informal imperialism,⁵ information networks and intelligence gathering were also central to this project.

These labours produced a prodigious, but by no means panoptic British archive of Qajar Iran. Victorian positivists may have believed that their vast collections of facts enabled imperial ‘control at a distance’,⁶ but knowing the borderlands was never free of epistemological doubt. British officials relied heavily on Iranian informants, although they distrusted native reporting as dishonest, exaggerated and biased. Diplomats, consuls and political officers professed the ability to judge the accuracy of such reporting and to register authentic information in the official record, but such confidence was belied by their susceptibility to rumours, manipulation and outright panic. Even when accurate, their data were paradoxically too limited to afford more than a fragmentary glimpse of these regions and peoples and too extensive and disparate to allow for ready analysis, categorization and utilization. The British archive of Qajar Iran, like British policy there, mirrored the fractured nature of the British imperial state, with authority and information divided between the Foreign Office, India Office, the Government of India, the War Office and their various subordinates around the world. Use of elite informants, moreover, left the British with a rather static, top-down view of Iranian society and an underdeveloped appreciation of important changes shaping late Qajar Iran from below. Although knowledge is inseparable from power, it is not a substitute for it, and British officials became acutely aware that their ability to project power in southern Iran ultimately depended on force, as World War I would reveal. For the man on the spot, consciousness of the dangers to British interests and of limited military means meant that protecting Britain's informal empire in southern Iran was a nerve-wracking endeavour.

British Political Intelligence and the Qajar State

The establishment of an Anglo-Indian intelligence network in Iran's southern borderlands reflected British analysis of Russian ambitions, British conceptions of the Qajar state and British imperial practice in India. Throughout the nineteenth century, British interests in Qajar Iran were primarily geostrategic – the defence of India against Russia. By the 1890s, however, Russian power and influence in northern Iran had eclipsed Britain's. With the conquest of Marv in 1884, Russia had finally made its frontiers coterminous with Iran's. Russian armies could strike anywhere from Azerbaijan to the Caspian littoral and beyond to Khurasan. Russia seemed ascendant in Tehran in 1900 and 1902, when the prime minister, Mirza ‘Ali Asghar Khan Amin al-Sultan, concluded two Russian loans totalling £3.5 million, which also barred Iran from borrowing from other foreign sources.

British officials accepted as axiomatic that Russia would exert its influence to secure a warm-water port in the Persian Gulf on India's maritime frontier. Indian security, however, required an Iranian buffer state in its western borderlands. On this point, Curzon was uncompromising: ‘Whatever destiny befall her in the north, in the regions beyond the sphere of our possible interference’, he declared defiantly, ‘Persia shall retain inviolate the centre and south, and be able to say to an invader, “Thus far and no further”.’⁷ Other observers more candidly admitted that Iran could not escape the era of partition diplomacy. Writing to the prime minister, Lord Salisbury, in February 1899, Sir Mortimer Durand, the British minister in Tehran (1894–1900), generalized freely that ‘Every Persian believes that sooner or later the country will be divided between England and Russia, and the southerner from Zil-es-Sultan⁸ downwards, looks to coming under the rule of England.’⁹ Russia's ascendancy in the north prompted British officials to explore ways to consolidate their own sphere of influence in the south.

Durand repeatedly recommended consular expansion as the solution. Significantly, he had spent most of his career in India, joining the Indian Civil Service in 1870 and serving as secretary in the Indian Foreign Department between 1885 and 1894.¹⁰ He was fluent in Persian but was fairly unpopular with Iranian officials, who resented the appointment of a Raj official as minister to the court of the ‘king of kings’. As one of his subordinates observed perspicuously, Durand for his part ‘had a good deal of contempt for the Persians and the impression got around that he wished to treat them as if he had been a Resident in India in a Native State’.¹¹ In September 1895 he urged Salisbury to strengthen British influence among Iran's tribal groups by means of political officers and consuls:

The reports of English officers who travel among the Turkomans, Bakhtiaris, and other wild tribes show clearly that at present they entertain very friendly feelings towards us. If we show more interest in them we shall strengthen those feelings and throughout Persia we can win over men to our side if we choose to try […] It will strengthen our influence materially […] if our Representatives at Bushire and Ispahan and Khorassan are encouraged to travel and make friends among the Chiefs and tribesmen […] but we must have picked officers, working with definite instructions and objects, not untried boys on leave wandering about and getting into mischief.¹²

Durand was apprehensive about the sensitive nature of these proposals. Writing confidentially to his friend, Lt General Sir E. F. Chapman, director of Military Intelligence, Durand hoped his memorandum ‘will see as little light as possible for it wd. play the devil here if the Persians got hold of it’.¹³

Durand waited until February 1899 before seriously elaborating. In another, longer memorandum he explained to Salisbury that although he favoured negotiating with Russia for a comprehensive settlement of their Asian rivalry, he conceded that the present prospects for such an agreement were not very good. In these circumstances, he was adamant that the Russians ‘ought not to be able to meet us on equal terms in our zone’.¹⁴ Newly arrived in India, Curzon enthusiastically endorsed Durand's plan and in the coming years he devoted more Indian funds and personnel to the project.¹⁵ By the time that Britain and Russia agreed to divide Iran into spheres of influence in 1907, British consulates had been established in Mashhad (1889), Muhammarah (1890), Isfahan (1891), Yazd (1893), Kirman (1894), Sistan (1900), Bandar-i ‘Abbas (1900), Shiraz (1903), Ahvaz (1904) and Kirmanshah (1904), with additional temporary posts at Turbat-i Haydari, Bam and Kuh-i Malik-i Siah. The Russians followed suit. The political officers who frequently held these posts reported both to the secretary in the Indian Foreign Department and the minister in Tehran under the Foreign Office, an arrangement that perpetuated, at a local level, the dual control that would often embarrass British diplomacy in Iran.

Qajar decentralization

The consular strategy indicated that while Oriental Despotism still loomed large in European visions of Persia, better-informed observers recognized that Qajar claims to absolute authority were undercut by the decentralized character of their regime. Sir John Malcolm's History of Persia, first published in 1815, shaped British discourses about the Qajar state. Curzon himself called it ‘the standard English work on the subject’.¹⁶ ‘The King of Persia’, Malcolm maintained, ‘deems himself vested with an authority independent of the law; and considers that, from the prerogative of his high condition he can take away the life or the property of any one of his subjects: but it has been shewn that the exercise of this power is practically limited.’¹⁷ The constraints on royal power, he asserted, included the ulama and the shari‘a; provincial magnates; armed autonomous tribes; urban elites; and popular custom, usage and opinion.¹⁸ As the nineteenth century progressed, British and Russian imperialism further circumscribed Qajar freedom of action.

Modern historians have generally confirmed Malcolm's assessment.¹⁹ Citing pre-Islamic and Safavid precedents, Qajar shahs conceived of the state and its offices and perquisites as personal property, to be allotted to the royal family, courtiers and others as they saw fit.²⁰ These extensive powers enabled the shah to fulfil his primary responsibilities: protection of the realm, defence of Islam and maintenance of justice (‘adl).²¹ Justice required the shah to maintain social equilibrium by balancing his subjects’ competing interests. Failure to perform this duty was, by definition, tyranny (zulm), which absolved subjects of their obedience. Qajar absolutism was ideologically restricted by the legitimacy of resistance to tyranny, and Qajar history is replete with rebellion, culminating in the Constitutional Revolution (1905–11). The Qajar realm, moreover, was vast and the Qajar state proportionally weak. The shahs lacked significant military or bureaucratic power and acknowledged considerable regional and tribal self-rule. Qajar rule necessarily functioned upon cooperation between the shah and local landholders, tribal chiefs, urban notables, ulama and prominent merchants.²² Such men performed vital state functions, notably revenue collection and military recruitment, and they mediated between the shah's officials and his subjects. The persistence of local power structures loyal to the shah provided provincial stability, while the shah's influence, in turn, was deployed in support of these local hierarchies. Royal endorsement in the form of offices, titles and honours enhanced the local notables’ prestige. In his capacity of supreme arbiter, the shah endeavoured to balance local interests and ensure public tranquillity. When it came to exerting some kind of control over these peripheral forces, he employed various methods befitting his arbitral position in political society: negotiation, reconciliation, manipulation, intrigue, as well as ‘symbolic punishments and rewards’.²³

Provincial elites were also important, because like the Qajar state, the Qajar information order was decentralized. Knowledge in Qajar Iran was concentrated neither in a modern bureaucracy with highly developed archival practices, nor in a public sphere of mass literacy and print media. Rather, it was widely diffused throughout society and embodied in persons, communities and networks. Elite families were crucial to organizing, maintaining and integrating these local information orders.²⁴ Royal officials depended on local specialists who possessed, and often closely guarded, information vital to the state. Knowledge of land and revenue yields, for example, was scattered about in the hands of kalantars (town mayors or high-ranking tribal leaders), kadkhudas (village headmen), landholders, vaqf administrators, harvest surveyors, mustawfis (accountants), provincial tax collectors, tax farmers, tribal chiefs and local governors.²⁵ Tribal levies remained important Qajar military resources, and the khans and lesser chiefs knew much about the state's capacity to make war. Merchants, bazaris, guild masters and customs farmers similarly controlled information about trade, commerce and manufacturing. The Shi‘i ulama's command of Islamic sciences was institutionalized in the mosques, madrassas, shari‘a courts and shrines that were an integral...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Maps and Figures
• Maps
• Acknowledgements
• Transliteration and Dates
• Introduction
• Part I Consuls and the Great Game, 1889–1907
• Part II Consuls and Revolution, 1905–1915
• Part III Consuls at War, 1915 – 1921
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography