by Tamim Ansary
Even then, the British did not name themselves rulers, not even of this one provincial piece of India. Officially, Bengal remained a Moghul possession and its government remained Bengali. Clive appointed himself a mere employee of this provincial government, setting his own salary at thirty thousand pounds a year. The East India Company enshrined itself as the Bengali government’s “advisers,” nothing more. For the sake of efficiency, the company decided to go ahead and collect taxes on behalf of the Moghul government. And again, for efficiency’s sake, they decided to go ahead and spend the money themselves, directly, locally: what was the point of sending it to the capital and having it come back again? Oh, and henceforth the company’s private army would take care of security and maintain law and order. But the company insisted that it was not now governing Bengal: it was just providing needed services for a fee.
The first few years of British rule worked out poorly for Bengalis. The company left day-to-day administration in local hands and focused only on matters relevant to its business interests. In practice, this meant the (powerless) “government” was responsible for solving all problems while the (powerful) company was entitled to reap all benefits but disavowed any responsibility for the welfare of the people; after all, it was not the government. Rapacious company officials bled Bengal dry, but those who complained were referred to “the government.” The plundering of the province resulted in a famine that killed about a third of the population in just two years—we’re talking about an estimated ten million people here.4 The famine damaged the company’s interests too, however, just as a parasite suffers when the plant on which it is feeding wilts.
At this point, the British government decided to step in. Parliament appointed a governor-general for India, brought the East India Company under control, and sent troops to the subcontinent. For the next hundred years, there were two British armies in India: so-called “John company” troops who worked for the corporation and “Queen’s company” troops, who worked for the British crown. It should be noted, however, that only the officers were European. The grunts who carried the rifles and took the bullets were local recruits or draftees known as sepoys.
In Bengal, Clive set a precedent that would soon be repeated in many other states. He established that Britain had the power and right to appoint and depose rulers in any part of India where the East India Company had business interests. After 1763, this was every part of India, because France lost the Seven Years’ War and had to abandon the subcontinent.
Britain soon decreed that whenever an Indian ruler died without a male heir, the British crown inherited his territory. In this way, Great Britain gradually took direct control of many states. In others, it installed a proxy who ruled in accordance with British wishes and interests. India became a patchwork of states ruled directly or indirectly by the British, the East India Company gradually emerging as the top power in the subcontinent and the true successor of the Moghuls.
Great Britain lost its North American colonies at almost exactly the same time that it was gaining control of India. General Cornwallis, well known to American-history buffs as the man whom George Washington beat at Yorktown, was the second governor general of India and the one who really consolidated British control there. Seen only in the context of American history, Cornwallis was a loser, but the chances are that he died proud of his life’s accomplishments, because India became “the jewel in the British crown,” the country’s most precious colonial possession, and the key to its dominance around the world.
With the vast resources of the subcontinent on tap, Great Britain could finance further colonial adventures in Africa and elsewhere around the globe. Naturally, therefore, it was very touchy about any threats to its jewel. And just such a threat did begin to emerge as the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth: the threat posed by an expanding Russia.
When the Turks conquered Constantinople, they plunged Orthodox Christianity into a crisis. Constantinople had been “the New Rome” and the heart of the (Orthodox) Christian world. Without a heart, how could the faith live on? The grand duke of Moscow stepped into the breach. This man, Ivan the Third, declared his capital “the Third Rome,” the new heart of Orthodox Christianity. His grandson Ivan the Terrible took on the title of Caesar, thereby claiming the imperial tradition of ancient Rome. (In Russian, of course, his title was pronounced “czar.”) Between 1682 and 1725, one of the czars, Peter the Great, built a formidable army and began carving out an empire east of Moscow. By 1762, when Catherine the Great of the Romanoff dynasty came to power, this empire extended way beyond the Caspian Sea, beyond the Ural Mountains even, deep into Siberia, stretching across all the lands north of India, Persia, Mesopotamia, and Asia Minor.
Catherine soon gave notice that Russia would not only push east; it might push south as well. Catherine’s armies engaged the Ottomans in a bid to take the Black Sea coast and drive the Turks out of Europe. Fighting the Ottomans was all very well, but the British could not have the Russians coming south into Persia or worse, down into the mountains inhabited by the Afghan tribes, for that would put the Russians within striking distance of the jewel in the British crown. For many centuries, in fact, the Hindu Kush mountains and the Persian highlands had served as a staging area for conquests of India. British leaders decided they must block Russian advances everywhere along this front. And so the Great Game began.
“The Great Game” was the term invented by British novelist Rudyard Kipling for the struggle between Great Britain and Russia to control the territory stretching between the Russian Empire in the north and the British Empire in the south. Everything that had once been Safavid Persia, everything that is now Afghanistan, much of what is now Pakistan, and all the territories covered by the former Soviet republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrghizistan, and Tajikistan—all of this was the arena in which the Great Game was “played.”
It wasn’t really a game, of course, and “play” is a misnomer. But it wasn’t really a war, either. Occasional battles broke out, and a few massacres, an atrocity here and there, but the Great Game consisted mostly of plotting, pushing, conspiring, maneuvering, manipulating, politicking, bribing, and corrupting people in the region mentioned. The adversaries were the two great European powers, and the people who lived in these lands, virtually all of them Muslims, were merely the chess pieces, the game tokens.
In Iran, the Qajar kings entertained a hope of reempowering their country by importing European technology and know-how. But whom should they get it from? They had such a choice of Europeans! Russian envoys were pressing in eagerly here, British envoys and businessmen were pressing there. The French, the Germans, the Swedes, and others were in there too. The Qajars had little power versus the Europeans, by whom they were wholly owned. They might have carved out some independence by playing one set of Europeans off against another but the kings of Iran saw different opportunities here, opportunities to enrich themselves by selling monopoly contracts to the Europeans and pocketing kickbacks. Essentially, they auctioned off their economy to foreigners.
“THE GREAT GAME”
One particularly audacious concession gave German-born British citizen Baron Julius de Reuters the exclusive right to build streetcar lines and railroads in all of Iran, the exclusive right to mine its minerals and log its forests, and the right to build and operate the country’s national bank. He got all this in exchange for a cash payment to the shah and the promise of some small future royalties paid to the national treasury. A storm of opposition erupted, which might have made no difference in itself except that Russia lined up with this opposition for reasons of its own. Under this pressure the shah buckled and canceled the deal. By the terms of the contract he had signed, however, Iran now had to pay Baron Reuters a forty-thousand-pound penalty. Fortunately (for the shah), this didn’t come out of his pocket but out of the Iranian treasury. Thus, the country (and its taxpayers) had to pay a British lord an immense sum to build nothing—and the deal did leave him with a controlli
ng interest in the new Iranian national bank.5
This sort of thing happened again and again, each deal putting cash in the pockets of a corrupt king and his relatives and giving a European company or government control over some aspect or other of the Iranian economy. If the deal was rescinded as it sometimes was, this always cost Iranian taxpayers some huge sum in penalties. Iranian citizens knew quite well what was happening, but could do nothing about it. Weak as they were, the Qajar kings had plenty of power over their own people: they could still put their subjects in prison, torture them, execute them.
From the European point of view, however, the country being sliced and diced and consumed was only the spoils: the great question was which European country would get to do the consuming and which would end up with a strategic advantage for further exploitation. Since the two chief adversaries were pretty evenly matched, Britain and Russia eventually divided Iran up into zones of influences, with Russia securing the right to dominate and plunder the north and Great Britain the right to do the same in the south. This agreement more or less solidified the country’s northern and southern borders and marked a line east of which all bets were off, a line that became Iran’s border with Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, the Great Game was playing out in that wild territory to the east as well, the Hindu Kush mountains and the plains north of them. Here, in the early eighteenth century, a tribal chieftain named Ahmad Shah Baba had united the unruly Afghan tribes and carved out one of those sprawling empires that unfurled periodically into India. Ahmad Shah’s empire was to be the last of these, however, because his successors had to deal with a new reality: the two mighty European imperial powers pressing in from north and south. The Russians kept sending spies and agents into Afghan territory to press for alliances with the king or with any of the rival chieftains who might overthrow him. The British did the same.
Twice, Great Britain invaded and tried to occupy Afghanistan, in order to block out the Russians, but each time the Afghans drove the British back out. The first Anglo-Afghan war ended in 1841 with the Afghans massacring the entire British community and its army as it tried to flee the country. (A British army came back briefly, however, to set fire to the Grand Bazaar in Kabul and burn up everyone in it.)
The British were still licking the wounds they had suffered from their first invasion of Afghanistan when a conflagration erupted in India. It began in 1857 with a revolt among the foot soldiers known as sepoys. British officers had ordered these men to grease their bullets with a mixture of beef tallow and pig lard, and the order didn’t sit well. The vast majority of sepoys were either Hindus or Muslims. To the Hindus, cows were sacred so greasing bullets with their tallow felt like sacrilege. To the Muslims, pigs were ritually unclean beasts, and greasing bullets with their fat felt repulsive.
One day a whole regiment of sepoys refused to load their guns. The officer in charge took decisive action: he put the whole lot of them in prison, whereupon riots exploded all over town. Apparently, it never occurred to the British that issuing bullet grease made of beef and pig fat might offend their sepoys. This cluelessness reflected the cultural gulf between the British officers and their foot soldiers, a gulf that had not existed before Europeans arrived, even though Indian armies were frequently composed of many different ethnic and religious groups jammed together, Muslim Turks fighting alongside Muslim Persians fighting alongside Hindi-speaking Hindus and others. These groups quarreled and bristled at each other, but each knew who the others were: they interacted. In Moghul military camps, their languages blended into Urdu, a single new language derived from Hindi, Persian, and Turkish (Urdu literally means something like “soldier-camp lingo” in Turkish). In the British-led Indian army, no new language emerged. English didn’t blend with any of the local languages because the British officers and their men moved in separate strata.
With their bullet-grease gaffe, the British achieved the goal that had eluded Akbar the Great: they united the Muslims and Hindus. The sepoy rebellion expanded into the Great Indian Mutiny of 1857-1858, during which both Hindus and Muslims attacked British settlements all over India. Muslim activists called the mutiny a jihad, and their well-organized assaults suggested that the bullet-grease issue had merely been the spark: a great deal of preparation had gone into the mutiny.
A great deal of preparation and yet not nearly enough, because British troops crushed the rebellion quickly and then went on a rampage of their own, plundering Indian cities for about a month, hauling frightened locals out of their homes and massacring them in the streets. In at least one case, they had native prisoners line up along a pit and shot them in groups of ten so that when they died they would fall conveniently into the hole, which made burying them easier.6 British historian Sir Charles Crosthwaite depicted the victorious campaign as a British Iliad, calling it the “epic of the Race.”
Once the mutiny had been totally quelled, the British abandoned all pretense, sent the pitiful last Moghul monarch into exile, and relegated the East India Company to private status. The crown took charge of India directly. The ninety-year period of direct British rule that ensued was called “the Raj.”
British leaders regarded India as the “jewel in Queen Victoria’s crown” and guarded it even more jealously than before. In 1878, detecting new Russian interest in Afghanistan, they tried to occupy Kabul again. Once again, however, they miscalculated the difficulties of occupying a mountainous territory inhabited by so many hostile and mutually antagonistic tribes. It wasn’t that the land was hard to “conquer,” as Europeans understood the term conquest. Great Britain easily marched into the capital, put its own compliant nominee on the throne, and appointed an “envoy” to direct him. In most contexts, this would have been conquest. But the British found that bending Afghan leaders to their will did them little good. The leaders they bent simply broke off in their hands and ended up as their dependents, not their tools, while the tribal people they were supposedly the rulers of operated in the hills as leaderless guerillas. The second Anglo-Afghan War took a nasty turn when the British envoy Cavagnari was killed and ruinous urban battles broke out; in the end the British were forced to pull back to the subcontinent again.
In the wake of this second Anglo-Afghan war, the Russians and British decided the territory ruled by the Afghan tribes cost too much to occupy and agreed to make the whole place a buffer zone between their empires: the Russians would not come south of the Oxus River, if the British would agree not to push north of an arbitrary line in the desert drawn by British diplomat Mortimer Durand. The territory between these lines became Afghanistan. Afghan kings, who might have conquered widely in the past, now focused on conquering deeply instead—conquering each tribe, each little valley, until this no-man’s-land gradually came under the tenuous control of a central government headquartered in Kabul.
But of course, the Russians never really abandoned their hope of pushing on down to a port on the warm waters of the Indian Ocean; and the British never dropped their suspicion of Russian intentions; so the “Great Game” went on.
West of the Great Game, another drama unfolded throughout the nineteenth century, another extension of European politics playing out in the Muslim world. Here, the major players were Great Britain and France and the tokens they fought over were the provinces of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. To the Europeans, the core narrative was the struggle for power in Europe among the developed nation-states there. What happened in Mesopotamia, the Levant, Egypt, and the rest of North Africa was just the relatively unimportant eastern part of the greater drama—just . . . “the Eastern question.”
The Eastern question gained particular urgency in the wake of the French Revolution, a revolution that frightened all the royal families of Europe, since its ideas denied the legitimacy of them all. The monarchies therefore united to crush the revolutionaries. They assumed this would be easy since the revolution had thrown France into such turmoil, but to the shock of all concerned, revolutionary France proved about as easy t
o conquer as a nest of angry hornets.
To make matters worse, out of the revolution came Napoleon Bonaparte, whose leadership instantly vaulted France to world-conquering might. Great Britain led the forces arrayed against Napoleon, and one episode of the struggle between these two sides took place in Egypt.
Western histories report that Napoleon went to Egypt in 1798 with an army of thirty-four thousand, Lord Nelson followed him there, the French lost a naval battle to the British in the Nile, Napoleon abandoned his army and sneaked home to stage a coup d’etat that made him the sole ruler of France and stronger than ever; and the war went on.
But what about the Egyptians? Who were they? What part did they play? Did they welcome Napoleon? Help him? Did he have to conquer them? Did they play any part in the battle between France and Britain? Who did they side with? What happened after the Europeans left? Western histories don’t address these questions much, focusing mainly on the clash of Britain and France. It’s almost as if the Egyptians weren’t there.
But of course they were there. When Napoleon arrived, Egypt was nominally still a province of the Ottoman Empire. Napoleon, however, engaged the main Egyptian armies in the shadow of the pyramids and destroyed them in less than a day! All the rest was mop-up until the British arrived, whereupon the real battles began—and they were between Europeans. The British fleet sank most of Napoleon’s ships in the Nile. He held on as “ruler” of Egypt for a year, but the plague ravaged his troops and order dissolved in the country he ruled as rebels attacked not so much French troops as any local authority. The British sent in more expeditions and convinced the Turks to attack Egypt too. Napoleon responded by sweeping into Syria and massacring thousands of people in the city of Jaffa. Finally he went back to Europe, but Egypt was a shambles by then. An Ottoman army officer soon took advantage of the turmoil to seize power. This man Mohammed Ali, a Turk born in Albania, declared himself “governor” of Egypt, as if he were acting only on behalf of the sultan in Istanbul. Everyone knew, however, that he was no governor but an independent power, a new king whom no one could deny.
