Britain’s response was to support the native regimes of the Middle East against European expansion. She did not desire to control the region, but to keep any other European power from doing so.
Throughout the nineteenth century, successive British governments therefore pursued a policy of propping up the tottering Islamic realms in Asia against European interference, subversion, and invasion. In doing so their principal opponent soon became the Russian Empire. Defeating Russian designs in Asia emerged as the obsessive goal of generations of British civilian and military officials. Their attempt to do so was, for them, “the Great Game,”1 in which the stakes ran high. George Curzon, the future Viceroy of India, defined the stakes clearly: “Turkestan, Afghanistan, Transcaspia, Persia—to many these names breathe only a sense of utter remoteness…To me, I confess, they are the pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a game for the dominion of the world.”2 Queen Victoria put it even more clearly: it was, she said, “a question of Russian or British supremacy in the world.”3
III
It appears to have been a British officer named Arthur Conolly who first called it “the Great Game.” He played it gallantly, along the Himalayan frontier and in the deserts and oases of Central Asia, and lost in a terrible way: an Uzbek emir cast him for two months into a well which was filled with vermin and reptiles, and then what remained of him was brought up and beheaded. The phrase “the Great Game” was found in his papers and quoted by a historian of the First Afghan War.4 Rudyard Kipling made it famous in his novel Kim, the story of an Anglo-Indian boy and his Afghan mentor foiling Russian intrigues along the highways to India.*
The game had begun even before 1829, when the Duke of Wellington, then Prime Minister, entered into official correspondence on the subject of how best to protect India against a Russian attack through Afghanistan. The best way, it was agreed, was by keeping Russia out of Afghanistan. British strategy thereafter was to employ the decaying regimes of Islamic Asia as a gigantic buffer between British India and its route to Egypt, and the threatening Russians. This policy was associated especially with the name of Lord Palmerston, who developed it during his many years as Foreign Minister (1830–4, 1836–41, and 1846–51) and Prime Minister (1855–8 and 1859–65).
The battle to support friendly buffer regimes raged with particular intensity at the western and eastern ends of the Asian continent, where the control of dominating strategic positions was at stake. In western Asia the locus of strategic concern was Constantinople (Istanbul), the ancient Byzantium, which for centuries had dominated the crossroads of world politics. Situated above the narrow straits of the Dardanelles, it commanded both the east/west passage between Europe and Asia and the north/south passage between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. So long as Constantinople was not in unfriendly hands, the powerful British navy could sail through the Dardanelles into the Black Sea to dominate the Russian coastline. But if the Russians were to conquer the straits they could not merely keep the British fleet from coming in; they could also send their own fleet out, into the Mediterranean, where its presence could threaten the British lifeline.
Toward the far side of the Asian continent, the locus of strategic concern was the stretch of high mountain ranges in and adjoining Afghanistan, from which invaders could pour down into the plains of British India. Britain’s aim in eastern Asia was to keep Russia from establishing any sort of presence on those dominating heights.
Sometimes as a cold war, sometimes as a hot one, the struggle between Britain and Russia raged from the Dardanelles to the Himalayas for almost a hundred years. Its outcome was something of a draw.
IV
There were vital matters at stake in Britain’s long struggle against Russia; and while some of these eventually fell by the wayside, others remained, alongside newer ones that emerged.
In 1791 Britain’s Prime Minister, William Pitt, expressed fear that the Russian Empire might be able to overthrow the European balance of power. That fear revived after Russia played a crucial role in the final defeat of Napoleon in 1814–15, but diminished again after 1856, when Russia was defeated in the Crimean War.
From 1830 onward, Lord Palmerston and his successors feared that if Russia destroyed the Ottoman Empire the scramble to pick up the pieces might lead to a major war between the European powers. That always remained a concern.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, British trade with the Ottoman Empire began to assume a major importance, and economic issues were added to the controversy, pitting free trade Britain against protectionist Russia. The deep financial involvement of France and Italy in Ottoman affairs, followed by German economic penetration, turned the area in which Russia and Britain conducted their struggle into a minefield of national economic interests.
Oil entered the picture only in the early twentieth century. But it did not play a major role in the Great Game even then, both because there were few politicians who foresaw the coming importance of oil, and because it was not then known that oil existed in the Middle East in such a great quantity. Most of Britain’s oil (more than 80 percent, before and during the First World War) came from the United States. At the time, Persia was the only significant Middle Eastern producer other than Russia, and even Persia’s output was insignificant in terms of world production. In 1913, for example, the United States produced 140 times more oil than did Persia.5
From the beginning of the Great Game until far into the twentieth century, the most deeply felt concern of British leaders was for the safety of the road to the East. When Queen Victoria assumed the title of Empress of India in 1877 formal recognition was given to the evolution of Britain into a species of dual monarchy—the British Empire and the Empire of India. The line between them was thus a lifeline, but over it, and casting a long shadow, hung the sword of the czars.
British leaders seemed not to take into account the possibility that, in expanding southwards and eastwards, the Russians were impelled by internal historical imperatives of their own which had nothing to do with India or Britain. The czars and their ministers believed that it was their country’s destiny to conquer the south and the east, just as the Americans at the time believed it their manifest destiny to conquer the west. In each case, the dream was to fill out an entire continent from ocean to ocean. The Russian Imperial Chancellor, Prince Gorchakov, put it more or less in those terms in 1864 in a memorandum in which he set forth his goals for his country. He argued that the need for secure frontiers obliged the Russians to go on devouring the rotting regimes to their south. He pointed out that “the United States in America, France in Algiers, Holland in her colonies—all have been drawn into a course where ambition plays a smaller role than imperious necessity, and the greatest difficulty is knowing where to stop.”6
The British feared that Russia did not know where to stop; and, as an increasingly democratic society engaged generation after generation in the conflict with despotic Russia, they eventually developed a hatred of Russia that went beyond the particular political and economic differences that divided the two countries. Britons grew to object to Russians not merely for what they did but for who they were.
At the same time, however, Liberals in and out of Parliament began to express their abhorrence of the corrupt and despotic Middle Eastern regimes that their own government supported against the Russian threat. In doing so, they struck a responsive chord in the country’s electorate. Atrocities committed by the Ottoman Empire against Christian minorities were thunderingly denounced by the Liberal leader, William Ewart Gladstone, in the 1880 election campaign in which he overthrew and replaced the Conservative Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield.
Claiming that the Sultan’s regime was “a bottomless pit of fraud and falsehood,”7 Gladstone, in his 1880–5 administration, washed Britain’s hands of the Ottoman involvement, and the British government withdrew its protection and influence from Constantinople. The Turks, unable to stand on their own, turned therefore for suppo
rt to another power, Bismarck’s Germany; and Germany took Britain’s place at the Sublime Porte.
When the Conservatives returned to office, it was too late to go back. Robert Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (Prime Minister: 1885–6, 1886–92, 1895–1900, 1900–2), aware that the Ottoman rulers were jeopardizing their own sovereignty through mismanagement, had thought of using such influence as Britain could exert to guide and, to some extent, reform the regime. Of Gladstone’s having dissipated that influence, he lamented: “They have just thrown it away into the sea, without getting anything whatever in exchange.”8
V
Germany’s entry on the scene, at Constantinople and elsewhere, marked the beginning of a new age in world politics. The German Empire, formally created on 18 January 1871, within decades had replaced Russia as the principal threat to British interests.
In part this was because of Britain’s relative industrial decline. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Britain produced about two-thirds of the world’s coal, about half of its iron, and more than 70 percent of its steel; indeed over 40 percent of the entire world output of traded manufactured goods was produced within the British Isles at that time. Half the world’s industrial production was then British-owned, but by 1870 the figure had sunk to 32 percent, and by 1910, to 15 percent.9 In newer and increasingly more important industries, such as chemicals and machine-tools, Germany took the lead. Even Britain’s pre-eminent position in world finance—in 1914 she held 41 percent of gross international investment10—was a facet of decline; British investors preferred to place their money in dynamic economies in the Americas and elsewhere abroad.
Military factors were also involved. The development of railroads radically altered the strategic balance between land power and sea power to the detriment of the latter. Sir Halford Mackinder, the prophet of geopolitics, underlined the realities of a new situation in which enemy railroad trains would speed troops and munitions directly to their destination by the straight line which constitutes the shortest distance between two points, while the British navy would sail slowly around the circumference of a continent and arrive too late. The railroad network of the German Empire made the Kaiser’s realm the most advanced military power in the world, and Britain’s precarious naval supremacy began to seem less relevant than it had been.
Walter Bagehot, editor of the influential London magazine, The Economist, drew the conclusion that, because of Germany, Russian expansion no longer needed to be feared: “…the old idea that Russia is already so great a power that Europe needs to be afraid of her…belongs to the pre-Germanic age.”11 Russia’s disastrous defeat by Japan (1904–5), followed by revolutionary uprisings in St Petersburg and throughout the country in 1905, suggested that, in any event, the Czar’s armies were no longer strong enough to remain a cause for concern.
The Conservative government of Arthur James Balfour (1902–5) nonetheless continued to pursue the old rivalry as well as the new one, allying Britain not only with Japan against Russia, but also with France against Germany. But Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Secretary in the successor Liberal administration of Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1905–8), pictured the two policies as contradictory. “Russia was the ally of France,” he wrote, “we could not pursue at one and the same time a policy of agreement with France and a policy of counteralliances against Russia.”12
Grey therefore negotiated a treaty with Russia, executed in 1907, that reconciled the differences between the two countries in Asia. Tibet was neutralized; Russia gave up her interest in Afghanistan, and left control of that country’s foreign policy in Britain’s hands; and Persia was divided into a Russian zone, a neutral zone, and a British zone. The Great Game had seemingly been brought to an end.
It could have been anticipated that the settlement of 1907 would arouse fears in Constantinople that Britain would no longer protect Turkey against Russia. A Palmerston or a Stratford Canning might have allayed such fears, but neither Sir Edward Grey nor his ambassador in Constantinople took the trouble to do so.
VI
There was an intellectual time lag between London and the outposts of empire. Grey, Asquith, and their Liberal colleagues saw Britain’s traditional rivals, France and Russia, as British friends and allies in the post-Victorian age. But British officers, agents, and civil servants stationed along the great arc that swung from Egypt and the Sudan to India failed in many cases to adopt the new outlook. Having spent a lifetime countering Russian and French intrigues in the Middle East, they continued to regard Russia and France as their country’s enemies. Events in 1914 and the succeeding years were to bring their Victorian political views back into unexpected prominence.
In one respect officers in the field and ministers in London were in agreement: both shared the assumption that what remained of the independent Middle East would eventually fall under European influence and guidance. Asquith and Grey had no desire for Britain to expand further into the Middle East, while junior British officers in Cairo and Khartoum harbored designs on the Arab-speaking provinces to their east. Both groups believed, however, that the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East would collapse one day and that one or more of the European powers would have to pick up the pieces. This assumption—that when the Ottoman Empire disappeared, Europe would have to take its place—proved to be one of those motors that drive history.
3
THE MIDDLE EAST BEFORE THE WAR
I
For decades and indeed centuries before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the native regimes of the Middle East had been, in every sense, losing ground to Europe. The khanates of Central Asia, including Khiva and Bukhara, had fallen to Russia, as had portions of the Persian Empire. The Arab sheikhdoms along the Gulf coast route from Suez to India had been brought under British sway; and Cyprus and Egypt, though formally still attached to Turkey, were in fact occupied and administered by Britain. The Anglo-Russian Agreement of 1907 brought Afghanistan into the British sphere, and divided most of Persia between Britain and Russia. In the Moslem Middle East, only the Ottoman Empire effectively retained its independence—though precariously, as its frontiers came under pressure.
Indeed, the still-independent Turkish Sultanate looked out of place in the modern world. Like a ruined temple of classical antiquity, with some of its shattered columns still erect and visible to tourists such as those aboard the Enchantress, the Ottoman Empire was a structure that had survived the bygone era to which it belonged. It was a relic of invasions from the east a millennium ago: beginning around AD 1,000, waves of nomad horsemen streamed forth from the steppes and deserts of central and northeast Asia, conquering the peoples and lands in their path as they rode west. Pagan or animist in religious belief, and speaking one or other of the Mongolian or Turkish languages, they carved out a variety of principalities and kingdoms for themselves, among them the empires of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane. The Ottoman (or Osmanli) Empire, founded by Turkish-speaking horsemen who had converted to Islam, was another such empire; it took its name from Osman, a borderland ghazi (warrior for the Moslem faith) born in the thirteenth century, who campaigned on the outskirts of the Eastern Roman (or Byzantine) Empire in Anatolia.
In the fifteenth century Osman’s successors conquered and replaced the Byzantine Empire. Riding on to new conquests, the Ottoman Turks expanded in all directions: north to the Crimea, east to Baghdad and Basra, south to the coasts of Arabia and the Gulf, west to Egypt and North Africa—and into Europe. At its peak, in the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire included most of the Middle East, North Africa, and what are now the Balkan countries of Europe—Greece, Yugoslavia, Albania, Rumania, and Bulgaria—as well as much of Hungary. It stretched from the Persian Gulf to the river Danube; its armies stopped only at the gates of Vienna. Its population was estimated at between thirty and fifty million at a time when England’s population was perhaps four million; and it ruled more than twenty nationalities.1
The Ottomans never entirely outgrew their origins as a maraudi
ng war band. They enriched themselves by capturing wealth and slaves; the slaves, conscripted into the Ottoman ranks, rose to replace the commanders who retired, and went on to capture wealth and slaves in their turn. Invading new territories was the only path they knew to economic growth. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the conquests turned into defeats and retreats, the dynamic of Ottoman existence was lost; the Turks had mastered the arts of war but not those of government.
Ottoman leaders in the nineteenth century attempted programs of sweeping reform. Their goals were the centralization of government; the establishment of an executive branch under the Sultan’s chief minister, the Grand Vizier; the rationalization of taxation and conscription; the establishment of constitutional guarantees; the founding of secular public schools offering technical, vocational, and other training; and the like. A start—but not much more—was made along these lines. Most of the reforms took place only on paper; and as an anachronism in the modern world, the ramshackle Ottoman regime seemed doomed to disappear.
The empire was incoherent. Its Ottoman rulers were not an ethnic group; though they spoke Turkish, many were descendants of once-Christian slaves from Balkan Europe and elsewhere. The empire’s subjects (a wide variety of peoples, speaking Turkish, Semitic, Kurdish, Slavic, Armenian, Greek, and other languages) had little in common with, and in many cases little love for, one another. Though European observers later were to generalize about, for example, “Arabs,” in fact Egyptians and Arabians, Syrians and Iraqis were peoples of different history, ethnic background, and outlook. The multinational, multilingual empire was a mosaic of peoples who did not mix; in the towns, Armenians, Greeks, Jews, and others each lived in their own separate quarters.
Religion had some sort of unifying effect, for the empire was a theocracy—a Moslem rather than a Turkish state—and most of its subjects were Moslems. The Ottoman Sultan was regarded as caliph (temporal and spiritual successor to the Prophet, Mohammed) by the majority group within Islam, the Sunnis. But among others of the seventy-one sects of Islam, especially the numerous Shi’ites, there was doctrinal opposition to the Sultan’s Sunni faith and to his claims to the caliphate. And for those who were not Moslem (perhaps 25 percent of the population at the beginning of the twentieth century), but Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Armenian Catholic, Armenian Gregorian, Jewish, Protestant, Maronite, Samaritan, Nestorian Christian, Syrian United Orthodox, Monophysite, or any one of a number of others, religion was a divisive rather than a unifying political factor.
A Peace to End all Peace Page 3
