What the British Did

Two Centuries in the Middle East

Peter Mangold

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780857729095
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

Britain has been engaged in the Middle East for over two centuries. During the Napoleonic Wars it expelled the French from Egypt. During World War I it helped to dismantle the Ottoman empire. During World War II, it defeated the Italians and Germans. In the post-war years, it attempted to reassert its domination of the Middle East but with little success. Today British forces in the region are fighting ISIS. Variously seen as intruders by most of the local populations and nationalists and as protectors by local pliant rulers, the British have been key arbiters in Middle Eastern politics. They created new states, determined who could hold power, resolved disputes and offered security to their clients. In this major new study, Peter Mangold shows how Britain sought to protect its changing interests in the region and assesses the British response to Arab nationalism. He examines the successes and failures of British policy and the reasons it has often proved controversial and accident prone.And he evaluates Britain's complex legacy in the Middle East - its contribution to the stability of Jordan (at least to date) and the Gulf states, set against the instability which has plagued Iraq and the unresolved Palestine conflict.
In tracing the history of Britain's relationship with the Middle East, Mangold reveals how Britain's involvement in the Middle East sowed the seeds for today's crises.

Part One

Lines of Incursion, 1798–1922

1

Persia’s Doubtful Friend

1800–1914

Every September since the British Empire began to disintegrate in the mid-1950s, a curious ritual has been enacted at the Royal Albert Hall in London. At the end of the last night of the Proms, broadcast on the BBC World Service and televised in 2013 to some 20 countries, an enthusiastic but largely unjingoistic audience sings some of the most stirring patriotic songs of the imperial era.¹ They include the paean to British sea power, ‘Rule Britannia’, and the setting of William Blake’s visionary ‘Jerusalem’, beginning

And did those feet in ancient time,

Walk upon England’s mountains green?

Composed during World War I, this equation of England with the Holy Land has come to trigger a nostalgic image of Englishness, of school chapel, cricket and tradition.² Then there is Elgar’s imperial threnody, the ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ (March No. 1), composed for the coronation of King Edward VII. ‘Wider still and wider’, sing the Promenaders,

shall thy bounds be set;

God who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet.

When these words were written in 1902, the British Empire was already the largest the world had ever seen, and with the exception of the Middle East, would expand little further. The original line of British imperial expansion had been westward across the Atlantic to North America and the Caribbean. But following the loss of the American colonies in 1783, imperial attention shifted east. British power in India was consolidated in the decades between the battle of Plassey in 1757 and the defeat of the Maratha confederacy in 1818. India was the platform from which British business advanced across Asia, as well as into East Africa.³

To Victorian statesmen the British Isles and India were ‘the twin centres of their wealth and strength in the world’.⁴ Britain, wrote one Viceroy, Lord Mayo, was ‘determined as long as the sun shines in heaven, to hold India. Our national character, our commerce, demand it, and we have, one way or another, 250 millions’ English capital fixed in the country.’⁵ By the 1880s India took 19 per cent of British exports, and nearly one-fifth of British overseas investment. Following the abolition of slavery in 1833, cheap Indian labour provided a substitute elsewhere in the Empire. More important, the Indian army, paid for by the Indian not the British government, provided the Empire’s central strategic reserve for use from China to the Western Front in World War I. If India went, so it was feared, Britain would cease to be a Great Power.⁶

India was regarded as an empire in its own right. Following the dissolution of the East India Company in the wake of the 1857 Mutiny, India had its own government in Calcutta, responsible for its own foreign policy, while a Secretary of State for India sat in the Cabinet in London. An empire on this scale had its own sub-empire. ‘Greater India’ extended from Aden to Burma, with its own sphere of interest in the Persian Gulf, Persia, Afghanistan and Tibet.⁷

India’s interest in the territories on its western flank was three-fold. Prior to the advent of steam in the nineteenth century, shipping from Britain had been routed around the Cape, with only some despatches going by way of Syria, Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf.⁸ But already some 30 years before the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, travel times were being cut by steamship services to the port of Suez, with passengers transferred overland to Port Said on the Mediterranean. The Anglo-Persian war of 1856–7 and the Indian Mutiny underscored the need for better communications between the imperial capital and its most important colony, and in 1865 London and India were linked by electrical telegraph, running via Mesopotamia, Persia and the Persian Gulf. Until the end of the 1920s, this was Britain’s most important asset in Persia.⁹

A second Indian concern, which became more acute in the wake of the Mutiny, and the growing British involvement in the Middle East, was the potential impact of British policy on India’s Muslim minority. Experience of various nineteenth-century jihad movements in India had created an image of Muslims as fanatics prone to holy war against non-Muslims and thus difficult to rule. By the beginning of the twentieth century more than half the Empire’s population were Muslim. Of these almost 70 million lived in India, with a disproportionately high number in the Indian army.¹⁰ This also meant that Britain was concerned with the safe organisation of the Haj, the pilgrimage to the Holy Places of Mecca and Medina in Arabia.

Concern with subversion underlay the third, and most important, Indian interest in the Middle East. The formidable Himalayan mountain boundary did not extend as far as the north-west of the country, at which point India was, at least theoretically, vulnerable. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the main threat was seen as coming from Britain’s hereditary enemy – France. The longer-term concern was Russia. The ‘Great Game’ in Asia, whose ultimate goal, or so the British feared, was India, might be no more than a tournament of shadows, in which the British at times tended ‘to see connections between a number of seemingly disparate facts’, but it was none the less real for that.¹¹ Behind the vague talk of invasion lay the more insidious danger of a European rival subverting India from within. This threatened to increase the costs of holding India to the point of making it unprofitable; alternatively the need to buy off such a danger could impose constraints on British policy in Europe.¹²

Apart from Afghanistan, the western country of most concern to India was Persia. Although diplomatic and trading contacts went back to the sixteenth century, until the very end of the eighteenth century, Persia was, in Sir Denis Wright’s words, regarded as ‘a remote, fabulous country, difficult of access, of some commercial but minor political importance’.¹³ During the nineteenth century this weak, sparsely inhabited country of 628,000 square miles came to be seen by the government of India as a buffer state, whose independence needed to be protected, but without incurring significant costs. There was no disposition, certainly in London, to turn Persia into a British dependency.

This had both advantages and disadvantages for the Persians. British interest offered the only available counterweight to the power of Persia’s great northern neighbour. The Persians had lost two wars with Russia in the early part of the nineteenth century, and towards the end of the century the Persian army had effectively ceased to exist. But, as the Persians would discover, British support was not something they could rely upon. British policy was very much a function of the twists and turns of European power politics. Tehran, the Duke of Argyll noted, was the capital where Indian and European politics met, but the centre of interest was Europe. European considerations, along with the problems of coordinating the various government departments responsible for policy making – the Foreign Office, the India Office, the Indian Government, the War Office, and at times also the Admiralty and Treasury – help explain why British policy tended to vacillate between what one historian describes as ‘active interference and passive contemplation’.¹⁴

The modern British relationship with Persia began with some ceremony during the Napoleonic wars, when the Persians found themselves repeatedly courted and then abandoned. In 1800 a British mission under Captain John Malcolm was sent from Bombay. Seeking to make an impression, he arrived with a retinue of some 400 soldiers, servants and camp followers, 137 horses, 27 camels and 345 mules, at a cost of £100,000, equivalent to nearly half that of the Mediterranean Fleet. It was the largest mission ever sent to Persia by a European power.¹⁵

There were several reasons for this lavishness. In addition to seeking to thwart Napoleon’s planned invasion of India in cooperation with Russia – a secret French mission had been sent to Tehran to request the passage of troops – the government of India was concerned about a threat to Punjab by the Afghan ruler, Zeman Shah.¹⁶ The result was a commercial and political treaty, whereby the Shah undertook to attack Afghan territory should the Afghans invade India, and prevent the French settling or residing in Persia. Britain was to provide Persia with military equipment and aid in case of a French or Afghan attack. But the French threat disappeared almost immediately afterwards with the Anglo-French Treaty of Amiens of 1802. When the Persians appealed for British help against Russian attack on their Caucasian provinces, the British refused. Never ratified, the treaty did not cover a Russian attack, but this did not stop the Shah from feeling betrayed.¹⁷

The Anglo-French peace was short-lived, and in 1803 Napoleon, who was planning another invasion of Egypt, was again showing interest in Persia.¹⁸ A Franco-Persian treaty of May 1807 was aimed primarily against Russia; nevertheless the Shah agreed to break all political and commercial links with the British and declare immediate war on them. French naval vessels in the Gulf were to receive support in Persian ports. When this treaty almost immediately fell victim to Franco-Russian rapprochement in July 1807, the Persians turned again to the British. They now sent no less than two rival missions, the one from India, the other from England. The 1809 Preliminary Treaty of Friendship and Alliance claimed to establish the basis for ‘a sincere and everlasting definitive Treaty of strict friendship and union’ between the two countries. The Shah declared the Franco-Persian treaty null and void and promised to do nothing to endanger India. Britain promised to send either forces or a subsidy, plus arms and training personnel, should Persia be attacked by a European power, i.e. Russia, even if Britain had concluded a treaty with that power.¹⁹

A British military mission duly arrived in Persia and became engaged in renewed fighting between Persia and Russia in the Caucasus. While the immediate aim was to divert Russia from Europe, the extent of Russian inroads into Persia was also beginning to raise fears that the real threat to British interests in Asia came from Russia.²⁰ Britain’s role caused some controversy. One diplomat expressed doubts about placing weapons in the hands of ‘these barbarous Mussulmans and even fighting their battles against our brothers in Christianity’.²¹ Any embarrassment on this score was removed with Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia. The British envoy in Tehran, George Ousley, now helped broker a peace agreement between Russia and Persia. He got little thanks, as the terms were a humiliation for the Persians. This didn’t prevent the signature in 1814 of a definitive Anglo-Persian treaty, though from the British point of view, it was already almost obsolete. The Persians, however, remained anxious for any support against Russia they could get. Earlier promises to train their armed forces were now omitted – the British military mission was largely withdrawn in 1815 – but the British promised military assistance, or alternatively an annual subsidy and arms and ammunition, if, but only if, Persia was attacked. This treaty provided the basis of Anglo-Persian relations until 1838.²²

Just how little the British were prepared to help became evident when war once again broke out between Persia and Russia in 1826. Unfortunately for the Persians, this coincided with British efforts to reach an accommodation with Russia to secure Greek autonomy and prevent Russia from dismembering the Ottoman Empire. To avoid the risk of war with Russia in Asia, the Foreign Secretary, George Canning, declared that Persia was technically guilty of being the aggressor and thus not eligible for British aid. Two years later, in an agreement described by one British official as of ‘extraordinary rigour, and even of doubtful honesty’, the aid clause was removed from the Anglo-Persian treaty in return for a cash payment.²³

The 1830s mark two new departures in Anglo-Persian relations. In 1834, in the first major intervention in Persian affairs, the British helped avert an extended succession struggle, when the British Minister, John Campbell, advanced £20,000 to pay the Persian forces, thereby securing the throne for Muhammad Mirza.²⁴ Four years later, Britain and Persia came into conflict when, encouraged by Russia, the Shah laid siege to Herat, which had previously been Persian territory. The westernmost of three Afghan states, Herat was regarded by the British as a gateway to India. They responded by occupying Kharq Island in the Persian Gulf, where they remained until 1842. Consideration was given to an invasion of Persia, but rejected. ‘If we were to march on Shiraz’, wrote the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, ‘we should either succeed or fail. If we failed, it is needless to say, we should cut a very sorry figure; and, if we succeeded, we might shake the throne and the power of the Shah more than would be for our interest.’²⁵

Besides, there was the risk of war with Russia, should the Shah appeal to Moscow for help. Though the Persians gave way, the matter was far from resolved. They occupied Herat in 1852, were forced out by a British threat to reoccupy Kharq, but then retook Herat in 1856. Despite some unease in the Cabinet, a Persian Expeditionary Force of some 5,720 men was despatched from India. By the spring of 1857 one-third of the Bombay army was in Persia.²⁶

The immediate object was once again Kharq, but this time troops were also landed on the Persian coast at Bushire. Better armed and disciplined, the British had little difficulty in defeating the Persians and the war was over in less than six months. Like some later British wars in the Middle East, this one wa...

Table of contents

• Author Biography
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Maps
• Introduction: ‘The Pedigree of a White Stallion’
• Part One: Lines of Incursion, 1798–1922
• Part Two: on Borrowed Time, 1922–45
• Part Three: Dissolution, 1945–71
• Part Four: Post-imperial, 1971–2016
• Part Five: Perspectives
• Notes
• Select Bibliography