Power Follows Justice, or How The British Supplanted The Ottomans

“The possession of great power necessarily implies great responsibility.” - William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne.

An excerpt from, “Promised Lands: The British and the Ottoman Middle East” by Jonathan Parry, Princeton University Press, 2022, Pg. 307 – 309:

The other danger posed by the threat of an Ottoman navy in the Gulf was that, by casting doubts on British paramountcy, it might revive Arab piracy. Poor Arab traders would be tempted to return to plunder, if they thought they could play British and Ottoman authorities against each other. This would be a retrograde step, since British ambitions to secure order in the Gulf were increasing significantly in the mid-1840s. In 1846, Hennell agreed informally with the Persian governor of Fars that British ships would police the Persian shore looking for pirates, though this agreement was not made public. In 1845, Muscat bowed to British pressure and agreed to confine its slave trading to the African coast rather than the Gulf. In 1847, the Porte agreed to forbid Ottoman vessels and subjects from engaging in the slave trade, giving British warships limited rights of search and seizure over them. Meanwhile, Hennell persuaded the Trucial shaykhs to ban the slave trade in 1847. Britain’s assault on the slave trade, as on piracy, was part of its aim of creating an ordered space for free commerce.

. . .The Baghdad pashas continued to irritate the British, especially once the London government’s concern over the slave trade increased in the late 1840s. As early as February 1845, Rawlinson noted that Necip seemed “to exhibit day by day a more determined resistance to measures of European intervention.” In May 1848, he described him as “daily more bigoted, more avaricious, more faithless and more foolish.” In 1852, Necip’s successor Namik declared that the orders of 1847 to stop the slave trade, sent to Baghdad by the Porte under British pressure, were not as far-reaching as the British claimed, and had lapsed. Slavery, he said, was “one of the most cherished domestic and religious institutions of Turkey”; in November sixteen slave boys were openly for sake at Baghdad. This was a striking gesture of resistance to Western pressure—all the more so given that, nineteen years earlier, Namik had appeared in London as a new model Ottoman ambassador seeking a British alliance, and had impressed everyone with his civility, education, and grace. Not for the first, or last, time in the Middle East, British local officials grasped that in practice they had to lower the pressure coming from London for a vigorous assault on slave trading.

Ottoman assertiveness, however, merely encouraged the British to secure their own position in the Gulf to head off any challenge. When the maritime truce in the Gulf expired after ten years, it was replaced by a permanent truce in 1853, guaranteed by the British resident and negotiated by Hennell’s successor Kemball. It offered the shaykhs permanent protection and “peace in perpetuity.” All the Trucial rulers agreed to prevent hostilities between them, and to rely on the British authorities to obtain reparations for any act of aggression on them. The Ottoman navy in the Gulf remained a phantom for some decades. Meanwhile, in 1861, the British met continuing threats to Bahrain, from the Saudis and others, with the first of several treaties guaranteeing its independence. The local British representatives rejected Ottoman claims to sovereignty, either in the Gulf or over Faysal, and insisted that Gulf security was a British responsibility.

So naval power guaranteed British authority on the coast. Whether it could also improve the economic condition of the pashalik of Baghdad was a greater challenge.