Another Excerpt From Jonathan Parry's "Promised Lands" - On The Geopolitical Value of Cyprus And Egypt

Jonathan Parry – Promised Lands: The British and the Ottoman Middle East.

An excerpt from, “Promised Lands: The British and the Ottoman Middle East” by Jonathan Parry, Princeton University Press, 2022, Pg. 393 – 396:

Yet there is an apparent paradox here. Though British sympathy for Ottoman rule in Europe was limited, fragile, and declining, upholding Ottoman sovereignty in the Middle East remained of great benefit to Britain. It provided a cheap and effective way to maintain British influence in that region, while ensuring that France and Russia were kept out of it. The history of British engagement with the Middle East after 1854 shows that it was much easier to consolidate its position on that basis before 1914 than to be the imperialist itself, as Britain became after the First World War.

By the 1850s, Britain’s commercial and political influence in Egypt was undeniable. Growing British support for the Egyptian regime throughout the 1800-1850 period was driven primarily by the economic interests of the main merchant networks, and the needs of the passengers and operators of the transit. Their priorities were always unsentimental—order and stability—but they also appreciated Mehmet Ali’s apparent respect for British, European, and Christian culture. Few of them shared the enthusiasm of the Constantinople embassy for the Tanzimat, which from the perspective of Cairo and Alexandria looked like sultanic bluster—more audacious, but no more appropriate, than previous attempts by the Porte to interfere in Egyptian affairs. Christians in Egypt already enjoyed protection, while the benefits of extraterritoriality meant that Europeans there had little need to worry about the viceroy’s draconian punishments.

Britain also clearly had naval superiority all around Arabia, and this seemed slowly to be strengthening British influence across the region. The perception that it was a supporter of the Ottoman Empire may even have helped British authority in India, to the extent that Indian Muslims believed that Britain was helping to defend the independence of their caliph. From now on, British India took an increasing interest in organising the “steamship hajj” for its Muslims, with significant cultural and political consequences for the Mecca region. British diplomatic pressure during the Crimean War contributed to the sultan’s firman of 1857 that suppressed the African slave trade in Egypt and Baghdad (but not the Hijaz), and to subsequent attempts to enforce it. What is more striking, however, is the consistent general appreciation shown by Britain’s consuls in Egypt, the Red Sea, and the Gulf that domestic slavery was an entrenched Islamic custom underwritten by shari’a law, and that sensitivity, patience, and compromise were needed in dealing with it.

After the Crimean War, as before, the core British interest in the Middle East remained the defence of the two routes across it that had been identified since 1798. From the beginning, considerable effort had gone into securing both. However, there was also always an element of rivalry between the promoters of each. In the 1830s, the development of powerful steamships had swung the balance decisively in favour of the Red Sea option. Even so, interest in the alternative route, from Syria down the Mesopotamian rivers to Baghdad and the Gulf, survived the failure of the Euphrates Expedition. In 1840, Henry Blosse Lynch journeyed to Europe to get more resources for his Mesopotamia steam flotilla, because he assumed that the Eastern crisis would make London a permanent enemy of Mehmet Ali’s Egypt. In fact, he was wrong, because Egypt was simply too valuable to Britain to make into an enemy. Still, the idea of steamers in Mesopotamia was raised again in 1847 when there were briefly doubts about thr goodwill of the Egyptian regime. In 1852, a Euphrates railway project was mooted because of the crisis over the Egyptian railway plan, and it was revived in 1857 because of post-war concern that the French might try to use the idea of a Suez Canal to gain predominance in Egypt. It resurfaced in 1878-79 as well. By then, Lynch Brothers, now clearly the leading British company in Mesopotamia and southern Persia, was running a commercial steamer operation between Baghdad and Basra that made Baghdad “well nigh as vulgarised by the inroad of excursionists as the Rhine or Venice.”

Occasional anxiety about Egyptian reliability aside, the main reason for continuing interest in Mesopotamia, before and after 1854, was geopolitics. If Russia was Britain’s real enemy in the East, it was reasonable to doubt that British predominance down in Egypt would adequately counter Russian aggression towards India. After all, Russia had been offering Alexandria to Britain since 1805. The Russian government and Bismarck both indicated at several points during the 1870s Eastern crisis that they would be willing for Britain to be given Egypt in a scheme of Ottoman partition. Disraeli’s government was understandably wary of this gift so generously proffered by the German chancellor. The Eastern crisis seemed to Disraeli to be largely about Russian assertiveness in the Balkans and at Constantinople. One way or another, Russia now appeared likely to acquire naval access to the Mediterranean.

What could be done to mitigate this threat? The old island acquisition strategy (originally John Malcolm’s) to protect the Euphrates route to India had focused on the sweltering Gulf. Now it re-emerged nearer to home. In 1878, the Ottomans agreed to Britain’s request to administer Cyprus and build a base there, in return for a guarantee of defensive military assistance in Anatolia. Disraeli told the queen that Cyprus was “the key to western Asia.” It was also a demonstration that Britain had not emerged empty-handed in the latest reduction of Ottoman power. One incidental consequence was that in the 1880s Cyprus was chosen by British evangelicals as the location for a short-lived settlement for Jews returning to the East, in the face of official hostility to the idea in Syria. Meanwhile, biblical archaeology, also funded largely by domestic evangelicals, developed apace in both Palestine and Egypt in the same decade.

The Eastern crisis of the 1870s underlined the indisputable importance of Egypt to Britain. (Indeed, some observers argued that controlling Egypt would also secure Syria and so would protect the Euphrates route from Russian attack.) The India secretary, Lord Salisbury, would have been willing for Britain to occupy Egypt in 1877 if necessary, even if it brought on a wider partition. The Egyptian regime went bankrupt in 1876, as a consequence of the flood of Western capital into it since 1856. Britain and France—the source of most of that capital—quickly moved in to impose financial rigour. This rigour helped to bring about a popular revolt. In 1882, Britain, citing disorder and likely financial chaos, invaded Egypt and occupied Alexandria, for the third time in the nineteenth century.

Gladstone, now prime minister, portrayed the intervention of 1882 as a necessary action on behalf of the civilised world against military violence. He ordered cannon fire in the London parks to celebrate the great victory of Tell el Kebir. He was thinking back to the old Concert view that Egypt was a legitimate sphere of British interest within the Ottoman Empire. Britain was as justified to intervene temporarily in pursuit of “order” there as Russia had been in Moldavia and Wallachia. For Gladstone, therefore, this was a very traditional response that did not challenge Ottoman sovereignty. In the late nineteenth century, an abstract question was sometimes mooted: What mattered more to Britain, Cairo or Constantinople? There was only one answer, geopolitically—the same answer that had already been given in 1801, 1807, 1833, 1841, and 1851. Egypt was essential; Constantinople was contingent. But the British did not want the question to be posed, and tried for many years after 1882 to avoid posing it. They continued to claim that nothing much had changed, and that their occupation secured Egypt within the Ottoman domain.”