Download PDF | British Imperialism in Qajar Iran: Consuls, Agents and Influence in the Middle East By H. Lyman Stebbins (Author), I.B. Tauris 2017.
321 Pages
INTRODUCTION
Visitors to Persepolis from around the world today still enter the palace through the Gate of All Nations, as their predecessors did in Achaemenid times. This monumental portal reminds them that Iran has long been an imperial, economic and cultural crossroads. Tourists soon encounter more jarring evidence of this cosmopolitan yet fractured history: graffiti carved by foreign, mainly European, vandals from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. One study has counted 222 such names at Persepolis, 158 of which are on the Gate of All Nations alone.1
At one level, these graffiti reflect an orientalist hubris inscribing itself, quite literally, on Iran’s ancient past, while on another, it represents the desire of long-dead travellers to be remembered, if only by association with the Achaemenids. Beneath one of the massive bulls guarding the gate are closely clustered the names of ‘Cap John Malcolm, Envoy &c. &c. 1800’, ‘Lt Col Malcolm J Meade HBM Consul General 1898 & Mrs Meade’, ‘1911[– ] 1912 39th K. C. O. Central Indian Horse [CIH]’, and ‘S.U. Singh’ and ‘D.B. Singh’.2 Nearby are ‘J. Singh’ and ‘Bhaga T. Singh’, ‘39th CIH 1912’.3 This group of graffiti illuminates key moments in Anglo-Iranian relations during the Qajar period (1796– 1925).
John Malcolm was an East India Company political officer who served as the first British representative to the court of Fath ‘Ali Shah, an appointment that presaged Anglo-India’s strategic interests in Iran down into the twentieth century. He also published an important History of Persia in 1815 that significantly influenced British efforts to comprehend Qajar Persia. Malcolm Meade served as consul general and India’s resident in the Persian Gulf at Bushihr between 1897 and 1900, and had to manage British interests in the Qajars’ southern borderlands in the complex circumstances following the assassination of Nasir al-Din Shah in 1896. Failing in this task by informal methods alone during the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905–1911), Britain despatched the 39th Central Indian Horse and the Singhs to Shiraz, inaugurating a pattern of military intervention in southern Persia that climaxed during World War I and contributed to the Qajars joining the Achaemenids among Iran’s fallen empires. Consuls and political officers were the key agents of British imperialism in late Qajar Iran.
Scholars of Anglo-Iranian relations agree that Britain desired Iran as a buffer against a Russian advance on India, but they have generally restricted their narratives to the highest diplomatic circles in Tehran, London, Calcutta and St Petersburg or to isolated provincial studies.4 Chronologically, these studies also tend to end or begin with the outbreak of World War I, obscuring critical continuities and changes in the Anglo-Iranian encounter before and after 1914. These accounts, moreover, rarely consider British imperialism in Iran within the wider historiography of the British Empire.5 Focusing more comprehensively on southern Iran, this book reveals that British consuls and political officers made these vast and varied borderlands the real focus of British power and influence in the country between 1889 and 1921. Anxious about Russian ambitions and Qajar weakness, Britain established an extensive consular network in southern Iran. In 1888, there were four British consulates in the country; by 1921 there were 23. The sensitive southern consular posts were mainly held by political officers from the Government of India’s Foreign Department. These men pursued British political and economic interests by cultivating relationships with Qajar officials, tribal leaders, landowners and religious authorities. British officers exercised a tense condominium in southern Iran, at times cooperating with Qajar power and at others undermining it in favour of different local actors and interests. Eventually they sought to occupy Tehran’s arbitral position in the provinces and establish elements of a de facto state, managing communications, finances and natural resources, and in some areas, commanding military power. They bound Britain, India and Iran together through discourses of colonial knowledge and patterns of political, military and economic control. This imperial context is essential for appreciating the emergence of Iranian nationalism as well as the failure and collapse of the Qajar state during the Iranian Constitutional Revolution and World War I. Iran was critical for British officials because it lay between three empires, Anglo-Indian, Ottoman and Russian.
This position helps to explain a curious irony whereby Persia loomed large in Britain’s ‘official mind’ but has proved difficult for historians to incorporate into their accounts of the British Empire in the Middle East and South Asia.6 This problem is further illustrated by contemporaries’ and historians’ uses of terms such as Near East, Middle East, Great Game and Eastern Question, with which Iran is always associated, but only partially and peripherally. Placing Iran and British agents at the centre of the story bridges these geographical and historiographical divisions. India was in many ways an imperial hub of its own, with an imperial periphery arcing around its vast territorial and maritime frontiers extending from South Africa to Australia.7 Southern Iran was perhaps the keystone of this arch, and consuls and political officers deployed Indian imperial methods and models to incorporate the region into the Raj’s political frontier.
India’s personnel, its sub-imperial ambitions and colonial discourses are crucial to appreciating the shape and scope of British imperialism in the Middle East. Britain’s imperial presence in Iran, however, was not uniform, but took on many forms, including alliances with local elites, spheres of influence, provincial state-building in cooperation with Tehran and military intervention. This comprehensive, comparative perspective reveals how local conditions and regional diversity shaped British policies. India’s political officers were the vital ‘men on the spot’ in Persia who mediated Britain’s global and local imperial interests. Political officers exported indirect rule from the native states of India to the Indian frontier and beyond, to Iran and the Middle East. Their roles in the Arab Trucial States and North-West Frontier Province have recently received attention, but no study has sufficiently examined their activities and networks in the intervening areas of southern Iran, which by the 1890s were viewed by many British officials as India’s most vulnerable borderlands.8 As consuls, political officers managed not only the Empire’s geostrategic interests but also its economic ones. They collected vast quantities of commercial intelligence, and in facilitating trade with the British Empire they helped to integrate Iran into the world economy.
Yet their commercial considerations were inseparable from the strategic needs of Indian security, and political officers equated the expansion of British trade with the extension of British political influence. The importance of the Foreign Department’s political officers in southern Iran underscores the Indian origins of the British Empire in the Middle East. Political officers’ colonial knowledge vitally informed British policy in Iran and the wider region. Lawrence of Arabia and his acolytes, for example, have recently been described as aspiring, modernist literati who preferred intuition over empiricism as the means to know Arabs and their desert environment and to achieve both temporal fame and spiritual fulfilment.9 By contrast, the military officers of India’s Intelligence Branch deployed ostensibly scientific methods that ‘disciplined the space of Asia’ through regularized ‘military statistics’ useful to armies on the march.10 The political officers of the Indian Foreign Department active in Persia utilized a more traditional kind of colonial knowledge – political intelligence gleaned from indigenous elites. Political officers had relied on this method of penetrating the ‘information orders’ of India during the conquest and consolidation of British rule in the subcontinent.11 In Iran, men like Sir Percy Cox, the long-serving consul general/resident at Bushihr, engaged in sustained personal diplomacy with officials and notables and daily negotiated the boundaries of Qajar sovereignty on the ground. The limitations of this approach were eventually revealed in the inability of British officers to appreciate the emergence of popular urban politics and revolutionary ideologies. British knowledge about Qajar Iran remained incomplete, a fact that caused imperial administrators constant anxiety. Their efforts nevertheless did provide them with a reasonably accurate portrait of elite politics in late Qajar Iran. Cox and most of his subordinates, moreover, were recruited from the Indian Army, and while they did not necessarily possess the positivist, technocratic outlook of their colleagues in the Intelligence Branch, considerable information sharing took place between the two services.
During World War I, political officers realized their latent military function, supporting British forces and raising local levies to defend British interests throughout Iran and also in Iraq, where Cox advised India’s expeditionary force and subsequently served as High Commissioner. Russia was the consuls and political officers’ primary concern, but Russian policy in Iran throughout this period was a more complicated 4 BRITISH IMPERIALISM IN QAJAR IRAN affair than simply menacing the Raj or gaining access to warm-water ports. Russia’s vast Eurasian borderlands stretched from the Baltic to the Pacific, and Russian geostrategy reflected deep divisions within the tsarist bureaucracy as to how to balance its interests in Europe, Central Asia and the Far East.12 Unknown to the British, Russian planners had admitted by 1902 that an invasion of India was not logistically feasible, and after 1905 their attention swung to East Asia to redress the serious weaknesses revealed by Japan’s victory in Manchuria.13 Imperial Russia remained the biggest danger to Persian independence, but tsarist policy toward Iran was not, as many British officers would have had it, purely aggressive. Between the Treaty of Turkmanchay of 1828 and the RussoAnglo ultimatum of 1911, the Romanovs closely supported the Qajars, integrating them into the international state system, albeit with secondary status, and providing them with an attractive model of authoritarian state-building.14 The Qajars relied too on British backing, pragmatically positioning themselves to make the most of the AngloRussian rivalry. The dangers to Iran of Anglo-Russian cooperation were made clear by the Convention of 1907, which divided the Qajar realm into Russian, British and neutral spheres. Although the Qajars feared a Russian invasion more than a British one, Russian imperialism was based on more than military intimidation. Like the British and other empires, the Russians relied on various methods of indirect, informal rule, such as alliances with indigenous elites and prote´ge´s, economic penetration and civilizing missions, both in Enlightenment and Orthodox idioms.15
Like their Anglo-Indian counterparts, the officers of the Asiatic Department of the General Staff also collected and categorized colonial knowledge about their Muslim subjects and neighbours – notably tribal populations – and their lands.16 In practice, British and Russian imperialism in provincial Persia often bore striking similarities. British and Russian borderlands overlapped with Qajar ones. While historians have long maintained that Iran’s central government during the nineteenth century was relatively weak and that regional and tribal autonomy were common, they have only recently begun to study the provinces and take a view ‘from the edge’.17 British efforts to know and dominate southern Iran were matched by Qajar efforts to understand, map and control their own amorphous frontiers.18 These lands, therefore, were not yet integral parts of an Iranian nation state but spaces that lay beyond INTRODUCTION 5 complete Qajar or British control, and this story is, therefore, about local communities negotiating their relationships with distant centres of power, Qajar and British, and in some cases Russian too. In different ways, Qajar and British officials viewed the south as a dangerous terra incognita that threatened their respective empires. Both sought to impose their rule over local peoples. Both used similar tactics – influence with provincial notables, arbitration of local disputes, rewards, punishment and promises of protection and profit. Iran’s southern borderlands were a site of competing empires, and the players in this Great Game were many and varied: Anglo-Indian, Russian, German and Ottoman diplomatic and intelligence agents; Qajar governors, officials, telegraph clerks and customs officers; and the local notables.
This last group – landed magnates, wealthy urbanites, tribal leaders and religious authorities – was particularly important, because in the absence of a strong centralized bureaucracy their local knowledge and authority proved essential for governance. Local elites also integrated regional economies into the capitalist world economy and pushed for political change during the Constitutional Revolution.19 Qajar and foreign attempts to access and co-opt these men, combined with improved communications, resulted in the development of new, overlapping information networks that connected the Qajar borderlands not only with Tehran, but also with London, St Petersburg and Simla. Regional elites were, therefore, well positioned to take advantage of the opportunities afforded them by the rivalries of Qajar, British and other interests. British officers in Iran depended on the cooperation of these men, as they did in India, Africa and elsewhere.
The point is not to deny the ideological power of Iranian monarchism, Persianate culture, or broader Islamic solidarities, but it does underscore that, in practice, Qajar authority was affected by other interests, loyalties and relationships operating in the shah’s far-flung territories. Many provincial notables regularly sought British intercession with the shah and his ministers. Many of them found British power conducive to their interests. By interceding between the Iranian centre and periphery, consuls and political officers altered the relationships between the shah and some of his most important subjects. When the Qajar reckoning came, the shah could not depend on these men to defend the old regime, and during the Constitutional Revolution and World War I they eagerly pursued their own political and economic interests, which in important cases aligned with those of Britain. 6 BRITISH IMPERIALISM IN QAJAR IRAN In addition to damaging Qajar legitimacy, British imperialism in southern Iran provoked various kinds of resistance. While they succeeded in making some significant allies, British officers also alienated many other actors and interests. Such incidents initially sprang more from concrete local grievances than from the sense of Iranian nationalism emerging in this period. British involvement in the grain trade caused bread riots and British quarantine stations provoked plague revolts. Shi‘i ulama often led these popular protests. British efforts to suppress illegal transit duties (rahdari) on the trade routes aroused the hostility of the well-armed men who profited from such revenues. British attempts to subdue tribal populations triggered serious confrontations. By the end of World War I, British power in southern Iran had become dependent on military force, which many Iranians, not just self-conscious nationalists, were determined to fight. Provincial resistance to British imperialism nonetheless intersected with Iranian nationalism in key ways. Iranian nationalism was a modern project, not a primordial identity, and was articulated by intellectual and political elites as an expression of defensive modernization, reform and self-strengthening, beginning in the latter half of the nineteenth century.20 By the turn of the twentieth century, Iranian nationalism was a civic nationalism, in which membership in this ‘imagined community’ was based on shared commitments to constitutionalism, the rule of law, freedom and the defence of Iran’s borders against foreign aggression.21
British imperialism in the south during the Constitutional Revolution and World War I enabled important provincial actors to position themselves as defenders of the nation against foreign imperialists and domestic traitors, even as they pursued their own ambitions. Local Persian historians praised these men as heroic constitutionalists and anti-imperialists.22 Before the 1920s, a decentralized Iranian state allowed for a decentralized Iranian nationalism that was appropriated by Tabrizi revolutionaries, Azerbaijani and Fars Democrats, Gilani Jangalis, Bakhtiyari and Qashqa’i ilkhanis (leaders of tribal confederacies appointed by the shah), and ulama, merchants and petty headmen on the Bushihr–Shiraz road. While this nationalism was not a mass movement, regional leaders appreciated its growing political significance and deployed it to build alliances in the provinces and Tehran.
With British rule a seemingly real possibility, early twentieth-century nationalists were more immediately concerned with protecting Iran’s sovereignty within its existing frontiers than with promoting a homogeneous vision of a Persian national community bound together by ties of language, race or religion. Localism and nationalism united, for a fleeting moment, against the common threat of British imperialism, and Iranian nationalism was sufficiently capacious to include anyone who might defy the British in the name of the nation, Islam, his own material interests, or some combination thereof. The coalition of local and national, however, proved fragile and in the 1920s Riza Khan crushed the borderlands.23
The ideological character of Pahlavi nationalism remains the focus of historical debate, with recent accounts alternatively stressing the emergence of an ancient pre-Islamic ‘authenticity’ in World War I, the ascendancy of a conservative, centralizing narrative emphasizing national continuities of ‘race, civilization, and religion’ under Riza Shah, or the celebration of ‘sacral monarchy’ as the mystical embodiment of the nation during his son’s rule.24 Whatever the case, Pahlavi state-builders cited British alliances with ambitious local elites and armed intervention in the late Qajar period as justification for their efforts to reduce regional autonomy, diminish ethno-linguistic diversity and construct a more homogeneous national community.25 Fears that Iran’s independence and territorial integrity were threatened by autonomous, potentially disloyal local elites was the reason many nationalists celebrated Pahlavi military campaigns in the periphery and promoted national unity at the expense of local differences. It was no coincidence that the Qajar political system, the power of local elites and Britain’s imperial network in southern Iran all fell together; their fates proved to be inextricably linked.
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