Yet Another Excerpt From Parry's "Promised Lands"

An excerpt from, “Promised Lands: The British and the Ottoman Middle East” by Jonathan Parry, Princeton University Press, 2022, Pg. 111 – 113:

The European peace of 1815 ended Napoleon’s dreams and left the Ottoman Empire intact. However, increased Western familiarity with its manners and customs had bred contempt. Russia seemed best placed to capitalise on its weaknesses. The Greek crisis that dominated the 1820s underlined the problematic fragility of Ottoman rule and exposed Russian ambition. In 1828-29, conflicts in the Balkans and the Caucasus showed that the Ottoman and Persian Empires were vulnerable to Russian pressure. The defence of India against Russian aggression became a major concern throughout the 1830s. As the Russians had penetrated Kurdistan in 1828, the fear developed that they could seize the Tigris-Euphrates region south of the Caucasus, and threaten the Persian Gulf beyond it. Almost no one thought that the Ottomans themselves could stop them. In Mesopotamia, there was a glaring power vacuum.

Steam-powered ships emerged as Britain’s main weapon in strengthening its position there, as well as in the Gulf and along the Arabian coast. It was hoped that these would demonstrate Britain’s military reach, and potentially bring commercial benefits, as in India. Steam power was a way of extending the cooperation with local Arab chiefs that had become the practice of the Bombay Marine in the Gulf, and the residents at Bushehr and Basra. In the 1830s, the Marine, renamed the Indian Navy, further increased its influence over the Gulf shaykhs. Its surveys of the Arabian shoreline culminated in the annexation of Aden at the mouth of the Red Sea in 1839. This was a remarkable extension of Britain’s practical power in a region that it claimed to have no desire to govern. It was done in the name of preventing other powers from interfering with Ottoman independence. The more influence Britain secured in the Ottoman Middle East, the more attractive the maintenance of the empire became. Even if it could not be saved, these initiatives seemed effective in shutting out Russian and French competition.

One benefit of cultivating the Arabs was to address the concerns of some commentators that Mehmet Ali of Egypt might otherwise create an Arab empire. Mehmet Ali had some successes in Arabia in the 1830s, in the name of the sultan. In reality, his intermittent activities gave Britain a convenient excuse to pursue policies that were primarily aimed against a threat not from Egypt, but from Russia.

Between 1827 and 1830, the powers of Europe were confronted with Ottoman decay and showed that they had no solution to it. The Greek insurrection, which had begun in 1821, proved so sustained and so well supported in the West that European governments had to accept some form of self-government, and then, in 1830, independence, for Greece. Publicity for the Greek cause, particularly in the British and French media, helped to demonise the Ottomans as barbarous and tyrannical interlopers in Europe. In 1826-27, George Canning tied Britain, together with Russia and France, to a plan of brokering a settlement between Greeks and Ottomans. His original hopes, crystallised in the Treaty of London in July 1827, were to try to limit the fallout for the Ottoman Empire. He wanted to lock Russia into a joint policy of peace and cooperation, to prevent France from experimenting with Ottoman partitionist ideas, and to satisfy Western supporters of Greece while restricting the new Greek regime both territorially and jurisdictionally. However, Britain could not control the course of events. The Ottomans resisted the attempt of the three powers to get them to submit, leading to the disaster of the Battle of Navarino when the allied powers destroyed their fleet. Ottoman pride and weakness then brought on a Russo-Ottoman war in 1828, and Ottoman defeat in it in 1829. France, not to be outdone, sent troops to Greece to put further pressure on the Ottomans to reach a settlement. By 1830, the Ottomans had to accept the humiliation of Greek independence, on top of Russian intrigue in their other Orthodox Balkan territories. The Russians invaded Moldavia, Wallachia, and Bulgaria in 1828, and in August 1829 were 130 miles from Constantinople. The peace treaty of Adrianople in October strengthened self-government in Serbia, gave Russia control of the mouth of the Danube, and legitimised its influence in Moldavia and Wallachia. Ottoman power in Europe was never the same again.

For Britain, the effects of the crisis of 1827-30 were most striking further east. In 1827-28, the Russian general Paskevich comprehensively defeated a Persian attempt to reverse previous losses in the Caucasus. The Russo-Persian Treaty of Turkmenchay then established Russian control of modern Armenia and Azerbaijan. Paskevich’s army immediately joined in the attack on the Ottomans, advancing through the western Caucasus and taking Bayazid and the Ottoman strongholds of Kars in 1828 and Erzurum in June 1829. Though the Treaty of Adrianople agreed the return of the later three places, it strengthened the Russian presence in the Caucasus by giving Russia important border forts, as well as extending its territory along the eastern coast of the Black Sea. It was clear that Russia could have forced more gains, but preferred to use its new power to exert continuous pressure on both Ottomans and Persians.

The strengthening of the Russian position in the Black Sea, and the ability of the Russian army to penetrate as far south as Erzurum, Bayazid, and Kars, had profound effects on British thinking. Erzurum was near the source of the western branch of the Euphrates. It was easy to imagine—and Paskevich had imagined—how an army could move southwards down the Euphrates valley towards Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf. Equally, Bayazid and Kars, further east, allowed the Russians to put more pressure on Persia and northern Kurdistan. Armenians in northern Turkey could act as facilitators for these Russian advances. The Treaty of Turkmenchay had already given Russia great power in northern Persia, not least through the exclusive right to maintain a navy on the Caspian Sea. From now on, Britain could never be sure that Persian chiefs in Tabriz and Tehran would not cave in to Russian demands. In April 1829, Lord Ellenborough, the cabinet minister responsible for India, thought that Russia would persuade Persia to bully the Ottomans and probably to go to war with them to give Persia Baghdad. The Ottoman Empire, like Persia, now seemed completely vulnerable to future Russian pressure.

In 1830, the almost universal British view was that the Ottoman Empire could not be saved.