Irregularly at first, but with accelerating pace, concessions to foreign traders built up. In 1872 the Shah agreed a seventy-year concession for Baron Paul Julius de Reuter, a Jewish German-born British businessman, for just about everything in the country. Local merchants and religious leaders made the Shah relent.15 Two years later, a German concession to build a railway line from Tabriz to Julfa died a similar death. In 1890 a tobacco concession to the British met with protests in Tabriz and Tehran, and a nationwide tobacco boycott – leading that concession, too, to be withdrawn, at great cost to the state. But the process of chronic indebtedness leading to more loans, and loans leading to more commercial influence and more concessions, was ineluctable. A British bank, the Imperial Bank of Persia, was granted the sole right to issue bank notes. A mirror Russian bank – the Banque des Prêts (later the Banque d’Escompte de Perse) – was set up to act for Russian commercial interests, and to claim interest on Persia’s mounting debts. Rights for shipping and fishing excited foreign diplomatic activity. Concessions for oil exploration were granted to British interests in southern Persia and Russia in the north. The best-trained unit of the Persian army consisted of Russian-officered Cossacks. By the time that Curzon was Viceroy of India, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the strategic importance of Persia was axiomatic to British and Russian foreign policy. Britain’s telegraph lines to Asia already lay across the country. Russia’s southern borders, galloping southward over the Caucasus decade by decade, encompassing an ever-greater share of the Caspian shoreline, and swallowing up and then exploiting the oilfields of Baku, inevitably infringed on areas of ancient Persian influence and interest. The country was trapped in an ever-tightening vice.
In the 1880s and 1890s, steel-tipped arrows rained down on Tehran in the form of essays and pamphlets critical of the Shah and his regime. Sayyid Jamal al-Din ‘Afghani’ – a Persian-born intellectual who travelled widely in India, Afghanistan and Europe, strongly anti-British, and strongly encouraging of pan-Islamic revival – was forced to leave the country in 1891, ordered out for his overly critical tone.16 In 1892 he put his revenge on paper, criticising the Shah’s regime as tyranny, and blaming it for the economic woes which had come to the country:
Is it the fault of Persia, land of the sun; land of the date, the pomegranate, the barley, and the wheat; Persia, with her coal-mines, and none to work them; her wealth of iron, and none to smelt it; of copper, of turquoise; her wells of virgin petroleum; her arable land, so fertile that one has but to scratch the soil and harvest after harvest springs as fast as one can reap; and her so-called deserts which need but the restoration of her irrigation works? But all is undone, ruined, blackened, curst.17
In 1896, Nasser al-Din Shah was assassinated by a follower of Afghani. But the death of one Shah did not entail a transformation of the country’s fortunes. Nasser al-Din’s successor, Muzaffar al-Din Shah, was no more able to wake Persia from its torpor, nor escape the pincers of the Anglo-Russian embrace.
In the years immediately before 1913 the pace of events accelerated, a bewildering succession of political intrigues, forward marches, retreats and upheavals, with more twists and turns than the passageways of the bazaar, more dead ends and more unanticipated openings. Suitably enough, it was amongst the bazaaris that the trouble began in 1905. Shopkeepers, students and religious leaders combined in Tehran to demand the dismissal of the Belgian head of Persian customs. The demand, ricocheting around the country by telegraph, and adding to other accumulated grievances, set off a cycle of demonstrations, marches and broken promises that continued into the next summer. Faced with possible loss of his control over key army units in Tehran itself, the Shah found himself obliged to accept the formation of an indirectly elected national assembly – the majlis – tasked with drawing up a constitution. The old regime had cracked.
The work of drawing up a constitution was quickly done. On the penultimate day of 1906, Muzaffar al-Din Shah accepted the new constitution; in early 1907, on the Shah’s death, his successor Muhammad Ali Shah was forced to do the same. It seemed at the time to be a watershed moment. Persia had arrived, wrote an editor of a Persian newspaper, in a ‘safe wadi of constitutionalism’, having undertaken a journey of ‘a thousand years – in the space of eight months’.18 But the revolution, if that was what had happened, meant different things to different people. A temporary coalition of anger against the old regime was no basis for a stable parliamentary government. The real business of politics – much of which happened outside parliament – remained highly opaque, driven by personal and tribal relationships as much as by parties or principle.
The majlis itself was divided between conservatives, who saw the overthrow of the despotic government of the Shah as the beginning of a restoration of a religious authority and the removal of foreign influence, and radicals, who saw it as the starting point for a truly social revolution, and a wider process of Westernisation. Conservatives criticised radicals for going too far, for wanting to undermine Shi’a teaching and the traditional role of religious leaders. External powers, rather than providing a helping hand, preferred to wield the carving knife. In 1907, an Anglo-Russian convention, signed over the heads of the Persians, restricted but did not entirely freeze the competition of Russia and Britain in Persia, agreeing zones of commercial influence for each, in which the other would not interfere. Constitutionalism was immediately discredited.
Sensing his opportunity to re-establish his supremacy, Muhammad Ali Shah attempted a coup d’état in 1908, firing on the majlis, plunging the country still deeper into the mire, and bringing Russian intervention in the north of the country on his side. The fate of the revolution hung in the balance, the country ablaze. Only in 1909, by dint of good fortune, shifting political alliances and the military organisation of the Bakhtiari tribal military, was the power of the majlis re-established. The Shah was forced into exile, with a pension conditional on his future non-interference in Persian affairs. But new battle lines had now hardened in the country’s domestic politics, the division between radicals and conservatives overlaying those of different factions, tribes and interest-groups. A new majlis was elected, drawn more widely than the last, and more conservative as a result. From his initial exile in Odessa the now ex-Shah was reported to be travelling around Europe, angling for support for a comeback in Persia. His replacement on the throne in Tehran was his twelve-year-old son Ahmad. ‘The prospects of Persia being able to evolve from the complicated situation confronting her [to] a reasonably stable and orderly government were far from encouraging’, noted Shuster in his memoirs.19
It was now that Shuster, the American, had his walk-on role. His plans for reform, involving the rearrangement of government finances and the collection of taxes backed up by a new fiscal gendarmerie – in addition to a Swedish-officered national gendarmerie recently set up as the kernel of a new military force to balance the Cossacks – offered a glimmer of hope. If order could be re-established, the excuse for foreign military presence would evaporate. If the country’s finances could be put on a firmer footing, might constitutionalism yet succeed? Such hopes were dashed on the rocks of local intransigence, foreign interests and a worsening political situation. Having travelled across Russia with arms and ammunition disguised in boxes marked ‘Mineral Water’, Muhammad Ali Shah himself landed in the north of Persia in 1911, in a last attempt to regain his throne.20 In Tehran, his son Ahmad Shah celebrated his birthday with the gift of a narwhal tusk signed with the name of Captain Peary, newly returned from the conquest of the North Pole, delivered to him by Mr Cairns, Shuster’s assistant. ‘Sultan Ahmad Shah had never before seen Mr Cairns and through some mistake of the interpreters he for some time labored under the impression that Mr Cairns was the discoverer of the North Pole’, reported Shuster, ‘who had come to present the tusk in person’.21 History does not record Ahmad Shah’s response in being apprised of the error.
The Russians, meanwhile, objected to aspects of Shuster’s plan as interferi
ng with their own interests. Pouring troops into the country to make their point, they issued a series of demands culminating in an ultimatum that Shuster be removed. (The British, following the line of least resistance, eventually came to support the Russian position.) The majlis rejected the ultimatum, but with Tehran under direct threat from the Russians the decision was taken out of their hands by another coup d’état conducted by the Cabinet, with the majlis dismissed and Bakhtiari tribal forces now disbanding the institution which a few years ago they had served to restore. The constitution remained, but the constitutional moment had passed.
By the end of 1913, the situation had recovered a little, but only barely. Corruption had installed itself with a vengeance in the provinces, and in Tehran. The country’s finances had settled down under a new Treasurer-General, Mornard – a former thorn in the side of Shuster – but only to the extent of adequately supporting foreign interests. The Regent had returned from his European sojourn, and a new Cabinet was being formed. Elections for a new majlis were anticipated for some time over the coming days or weeks, though the British diplomat on the ground observed ‘no outward signs’ that such an eventuality was being prepared.22 The propriety of formally crowning the young Ahmad Shah was under discussion, some arguing that he was too young and inexperienced, others that a crowned head instead of the politicking around a Regent was exactly what the country needed.
And yet had not Persia, as a viable independent state, been already hollowed out, as Curzon had remarked earlier in the year? To what? A jumble of ideas, ambitions, slogans, hopes and fears, enemies within and enemies without; a strengthened sense of Persian national identity perhaps, but without the means to give it form; a Russian-dominated north – perhaps permanently so – and a southern portion where robber bands arrived with the spring, and left only with the onset of winter.
All the while, one final aspect of Persia heaved more firmly into view, for the British in particular, worried about the decline of naval pre-eminence, and looking for a solution: oil.
The British commercial quest for oil in Persia had begun ten years before, with the grant of a concession to the Australian-educated William Knox D’Arcy to search for black gold in the southern provinces of the country. Its strategic significance, however, had skyrocketed only much more recently, with the decision by Winston Churchill, British First Lord of the Admiralty, that oil was the fuel of the future for the Royal Navy, allowing for faster ships with greater range than coal, requiring less time and fewer men to refuel, and offering the possibility of all this happening quite easily at sea rather than at Britain’s many coaling stations around the world.23 The only problem with Churchill’s strategy, as its critics were keen to point out, was getting hold of the fuel itself at a reasonable price, without being forced to pay ever-higher prices in a crisis, potentially bidding directly against its enemies. For while coal was abundant in the United Kingdom, oil was not. Its price was rising and its relative abundance or scarcity unproven. ‘Mr Churchill is of course much too clever to see’, noted The Economist sourly, ‘that in exchanging steam coal, which is almost our [British] monopoly, for oil fuel, in which we are very poor, Great Britain is once more handicapping her fleet and her taxpayers’.24
First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill. Having pushed for the Royal Navy to be run on fuel oil rather than coal, in 1913 Churchill was instrumental in securing Persian oil supplies for the navy, inaugurating an era of petro-geopolitics.
Persia could never be more than one of several prospective sources for British oil. As Churchill told the House of Commons in July 1913, ‘on no one quality, on no one process, on no one country, on no one company, on no one route, and on no one oil field must we be dependent. Safety and certainty in oil lie in variety, and in variety alone’.25 But Persia was a special case. Much of the rest of the world’s supply was in Russia, or in the United States, or under the control of consortia in which there was a strong non-British element – a judgement which applied to Royal Dutch Shell, despite the business being based in London, and most of its directors being British. (Mexico was an alternative to Persia, of course; but it was a country on the other side of the Atlantic, with its own political problems attached.)
In south-west Persia, however, following the discovery of oil in 1908 on the concession granted to William Knox D’Arcy, an entirely British operation had sprung up. Known by 1913 as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company – and much later as British Petroleum – British diplomatic assistance, both in Tehran and locally, had been critical to getting the whole thing off the ground. Locally, a secret British guarantee of political support to the local Arab magnate Sheikh Khaz’al of Muhammerah (Khorramshahr, in Persian), allowed British commercial interests to more or less bypass the central Persian authorities entirely, particularly important when it came to shipping in the necessary infrastructure to build a pipeline and a refinery.26 Britain had already developed a series of strong local relationships at other points along the Persian Gulf, in places where the Admiralty had also considered the possibility of oil, in Kuwait and Bahrain. In 1910, Sheikh Khaz’al was made a Knight Commander of the Most Eminent Order of the Indian Empire for his services.
In 1913, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company raised the possibility – or perhaps the threat – that, were it not to achieve a position of greater financial strength, it might be unable to produce the resources of its concession or else be pushed into a price war with other consortia with more extensive marketing operations, and ultimately be bought out by them. (The Turkish Petroleum Company, a consortium of largely foreign partners set up the previous year, was mooted as a possible buyer.) If, on the other hand, Anglo-Persian was able to strike some kind of financial deal with the Admiralty and the government of India, assuring the firm’s long-term future, it would be in a position to offer them a forward contract for oil at a decent price. A key source of British supply would be secured. The strategic risk associated with a shift from coal to oil would be partly mitigated.
That the Admiralty would sign up to such a scheme, essentially turning the British government into the strategic partner of a commercial player, was not a foregone conclusion. The Admiralty had to be won round – by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, by Churchill himself, and by the weight of positive appraisals Churchill had engineered, including one by Admiral Fisher, the father of the modern Royal Navy. Eventually, however, the job was done. In the autumn of 1913, to settle the matter once and for all on the naval side, a commission under Rear Admiral Sir Edmond Slade, a former Director of Naval Intelligence, was sent through the Strait of Hormuz and up along the Persian Gulf, to Bahrain, Kuwait and, in south-west Persia, up the Karun River to Maidan i-Naphtun and White Oil Springs, inspecting the rock formations, estimating its productive capacity and speaking to the geologists on site. Reaching Muhammerah on 23 October 1913, they celebrated New Year in the region, arriving back in England only at the end of January 1914.
They returned to London full of praise. Persia, it seemed, would fit the bill for British requirements nicely. Thus from a buffer between British India and Russia, a country prized as a market for British and Indian goods, and a route for British telegraph wires, Persia would now, over time, develop into something still more: a vital strategic asset of a foreign nation. From 1913 on, the history of Persia would be intertwined with a new aspect to global power – oil – a fate from which the country could no more escape than from its storied history, or from its awkward present.
JERUSALEM
Zion and its Discontents
As 1913 drew to an end, the Holy Land received two visitors from the sky.
The first was French pilot Jules Védrines, an old-timer in the new world of the aeroplane. Winner of the Paris–Madrid air race of 1911, he was competing in a gruelling air race to Cairo, which had already taken him across Europe, across Turkey, over the Taurus mountain range, and now to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. In late December 1913, he became the first aviator to land on the bumpy ground of Palest
ine. Having damaged his landing gear coming down on the coastal plain, Védrines was forced to stay the night. The next day, however, he was off, continuing his journey along the coast to Cairo, after a short demonstration flight over the city of Jaffa.
Behind him came his compatriot Marc Bonnier. Realising that he had no chance of catching the leader in the race, Bonnier decided instead to become the first man to land a plane at Jerusalem itself. In the event, he touched down a mile or so south of the Old City. These landings were double proof of French mastery of the air, evidence that in some fields of endeavour at least, the flair, technology and heroism of the French was still superior to that of other nations. French prestige amongst the local population of the Holy Land was lifted, as the resident German diplomat reported crossly, with cries of ‘Vive la France!’ ringing out on the streets. Still, he added, more might have been achieved were it not for the weaknesses of his French counterpart: ‘never in his office, sleeps the whole day, conducts no business at all – except with prostitutes’.1 Bonnier ascended into the air again, leaving the earth behind, the holiest city on earth viewed as no human had ever viewed it before.
Jerusalem in 1913 was not a city on any great trade routes. It was not of any great military significance. Though no one knew the number of its Ottoman and foreign inhabitants with any certainty, it was certainly not a large city by any means, numbering no more than 100,000 at most, of whom perhaps half were Jewish (many of whom were not Ottoman citizens), a little over one-quarter Christian (mostly Arab) and a little less than a quarter Muslim, all living within the broader, overwhelmingly Arab Palestine, itself sparsely populated, punctuated by more recent Jewish colonies.2 The city’s mayors, all Arab, were drawn from the traditional leading families of Palestine – the Husseinis and the Khalidis in particular. Jerusalem’s political importance to the Ottoman Empire, of which it was an outlying district or sancak, lay above all in its symbolic importance as a holy city for Muslims, for Christians and for Jews. This triple religious heritage had inspired a complex and sometimes tortured history, and had contemporary consequences for international interest in the city.
1913 Page 37
