Promised Lands

The British and the Ottoman Middle East

Jonathan Parry

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780691231440, 9780691181899
• eBook ISBN: 9780691231457
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

A major history of the British Empire’s early involvement in the Middle East

Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 showed how vulnerable India was to attack by France and Russia. It forced the British Empire to try to secure the two routes that a European might use to reach the subcontinent—through Egypt and the Red Sea, and through Baghdad and the Persian Gulf. Promised Lands is a panoramic history of this vibrant and explosive age.

Charting the development of Britain’s political interest in the Middle East from the Napoleonic Wars to the Crimean War in the 1850s, Jonathan Parry examines the various strategies employed by British and Indian officials, describing how they sought influence with local Arabs, Mamluks, Kurds, Christians, and Jews. He tells a story of commercial and naval power—boosted by the arrival of steamships in the 1830s—and discusses how classical and biblical history fed into British visions of what these lands might become. The region was subject to the Ottoman Empire, yet the sultan’s grip on it appeared weak. Should Ottoman claims to sovereignty be recognised and exploited, or ignored and opposed? Could the Sultan’s government be made to support British objectives, or would it always favour France or Russia?

Promised Lands shows how what started as a geopolitical contest became a drama about diplomatic competition, religion, race, and the unforeseen consequences of history.

CHAPTER ONE

Napoleon, India, and the Battle for Egypt

ON MAY 9, 1798, the ambitious young general Napoleon Bonaparte stood before his soldiers at Toulon, France’s Mediterranean naval base, and told them that they were the heirs of the Roman legions whose discipline and prowess had subdued the African power of Carthage. Ten days later, his army sailed, like the Romans, across the Mediterranean—not to Carthage but to Alexandria, the Egyptian port built, as he later reminded them, by Alexander the Great himself.¹ Once reinforced from Corsica and Civitavecchia, this was an immense expedition: 31,000 men, seventeen warships and frigates, nearly four hundred transports, plus 167 men of letters who were to record its benefits for human civilisation. They landed at Alexandria on July 1, and had taken Cairo and the main arteries of Egypt by the end of the month.²

British spies had observed the expedition assemble, but were unclear where it was headed. Was it Sicily, Syria, or, as the Russians believed, the Balkans? The British government was preoccupied with the risk of a French invasion of Ireland or Britain. Admiral Nelson had been sent into the Mediterranean to prevent this great fleet moving west and north. He failed to find it en route; he finally discovered the ships moored in Abukir Bay and destroyed nearly all of them in early August. Even so, the greatest general of the age had succeeded in occupying the crucial strip of fertile land along the Nile that connected the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and to India. He had indicated that France was now fighting not just a European and Caribbean battle, but one for world domination. For the British, the French Wars had always been about colonies, trade, and wealth as much as about continental alliances, but mostly so far in the West Indies. Now, suddenly, the new British Empire in the East was at stake.

In invading Egypt and displacing the ruling regime of Mamluks, Napoleon was also invading the Ottoman Empire. Since the 1770s, the Mamluk leaders Murad and Ibrahim had consistently managed to resist Ottoman power in Egypt, as had their recent predecessors. Nonetheless, they recognised the sovereignty of the sultan, and the sultan was naturally horrified by a European invasion of his lands. The British government had to consider how far to ally with the Ottomans, as well as the Russians, in order to oppose him. Britain had not thought seriously about Ottoman territory previously. Most British policymakers assumed that a Eurocentric strategy was needed to defeat France’s military expansion. Diplomacy and subsidies would persuade Austria, Prussia, and others to do most of the fighting. This continued to be the approach of the foreign secretary, Lord Grenville. For Grenville, the East was relevant only insofar as it affected the European military balance. By 1800, his approach had failed. His cabinet rival Henry Dundas had an alternative strategy, which involved seeking military help from India rather than unreliable Europeans. It also involved cultivating local Arabs and Mamluks in order to build a coalition against France on the ground. In 1801, Dundas’s approach succeeded in getting the French out of Egypt. Their departure was followed by peace talks, but if the French resumed the war, it was easy to see how they might return. This was partly because British officers never trusted the Ottomans to fight effectively. The war of 1799–1801 revealed enormous tensions between the British and their supposed allies. Was it safe, or honourable, to hand Egypt back to them?

Grenville, the Eurocentric Approach, and Sidney Smith

In the late eighteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was not a formal part of the European political system. A Christian diplomatic representative to the Porte was treated as an infidel intruder and forced to walk backwards in the presence of the sultan, deprived of his sword.³ Though the empire had informal contacts with European powers, it did not have resident ambassadors in their capitals before the 1790s, and was not expected to engage in international conferences or to participate in alliances. These traditions were being eroded by the growing threat to the empire, particularly from Russia in the Black Sea region. Russia secured access to the Black Sea in 1774 and annexed the Crimea, including significant numbers of Muslims, in 1783. Russia had also occupied the Ottomans’ Danubian Principalities (Moldavia and Wallachia) in the war of 1768–74; then, in return for handing them back, it secured some rights to protect Orthodox Christians there against misrule. In 1772, Russia and Austria combined to take some of Poland’s territory, and in further partitions of 1793 and 1795 Poland was swallowed completely by these two powers and Prussia. It seemed likely that the Ottoman Empire would be partitioned in the same way. Under Catherine II, Russia seemed to have bent Prussia and Austria to its will, securing itself from attack, swinging the balance of power in Europe to the east, and making France and the Ottomans more insecure. In return, the Ottomans cultivated the protection of France, continuing a historic link going back to the sixteenth century. So in 1793, when France began its war with most of Europe, the Ottomans had no incentive to join in.⁴

British interests at Constantinople were much more limited than French or Russian ones. The role of British ambassador to the Ottoman Porte had grown out of the Levant Company’s need to protect its trading arrangements. The company had been created in 1592 by merging existing trading entities with Venice and Turkey. It paid the salary of a representative at Constantinople, and was still funding the bulk of this salary in the 1790s, together with generous gifts to Ottoman officials. By now, this arrangement seemed anomalous, since from the 1690s the Crown had appointed the ambassador, recognising that the role was political as well as commercial. Even so, most embassy business was still bound up with the affairs of the Levant Company’s three trading bases at Constantinople, Smyrna, and Aleppo. These affairs remained healthy for most of the eighteenth century, but had declined by the 1790s, especially in Aleppo, which depended on the trade between western Asia and the Mediterranean. This trade was increasingly being routed through either the Persian Gulf or the Black Sea, while the direct commerce between England and India round the Cape now dwarfed it altogether. Meanwhile the trade from the Syrian ports to the Mediterranean was now dominated by France. Moreover, in 1753 the Levant Company in effect lost its monopoly on the trade between the Levant and England, and was often undercut. The company’s profits fell significantly, and from the 1760s Parliament often needed to subsidise its embassy costs. Most “ambassadors” were also involved in commerce: in the 1780s, Robert Ainslie supplemented his salary by exporting wine and by charging commissions on money changing.⁵

Before the 1790s, British diplomacy focused on the European balance and on America, not on the eastern Mediterranean. Ainslie was told to be neutral in the Russo-Ottoman war of 1788. Britain tended to be relaxed about Russia’s expansion in that region, because checking French power was a greater anxiety. Not until 1791 did Britain first challenge it, when William Pitt’s government sent Russia an ultimatum to evacuate the Black Sea port of Ochakov, which it had occupied since taking it from the Ottomans in 1788. Even so, this threat was not couched in terms of defending the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, showed no interest in Constantinople as an ally, was widely criticised in the House of Commons, and was quickly abandoned. It was a failed attempt to hold together Britain’s alliance with Prussia, which feared Russian expansion in the Balkans.⁶ The Ottomans’ further defeat at Russia’s hands in 1792 prompted the Porte to send a diplomatic mission to Britain for the first time, in 1793—but also to recognise the new French republic in 1795. The Ottomans needed all the friends they could get.

Until 1798, the war hardly impinged on Ottoman territory. In 1796, Robert Liston, Ainslie’s successor at Constantinople, was allowed to leave for a post in America, unhappy at the poor salary and lack of influence.⁷ In the same year, the British fleet was withdrawn from the Mediterranean for the first time in centuries, because a French-Spanish alliance increased the fear of invasion and made home defence a priority. Then a peace treaty with Austria in October 1797 gave France the old Venetian territories of Corfu and the other Ionian islands: these could be bases for an invasion of the sultan’s Balkan territories. Within a few months, Napoleon invaded Ottoman Egypt—and underlined his strength in the Mediterranean by occupying the strategic island of Malta en route, which was previously governed by the Order of Saint John. The invasion of Egypt by a Christian power inevitably forced the sultan to declare war against France in September 1798. Moreover, Russia offered him a treaty of mutual defence, in the hope of replacing French influence at Constantinople with its own. From now on, whenever France or Russia overtly threatened the enfeebled Ottoman regime, the other power would promise it protection in the hope of achieving dominance by stealthier means. In fact, France’s invasion of Egypt did not mean that it had given up hope of wooing the Ottomans itself. The move was a warning to the sultan not to let Russia take control of the straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. It was a demand to play a part in all future diplomatic discussions in the region—a response to the unwillingness of the three eastern powers to consult France over the partition of Poland. So it was a statement against unbridled Russian dominance in the Balkan region. But it was also clearly an attempt to control the Mediterranean and its shores, a great springboard from which to challenge British dominance in Asia.

Napoleon’s invasion had a dramatic effect on British strategy. It immediately forced Britain to abandon the attempt to take Manila and Java (owned by France’s Spanish and Dutch allies) and to concentrate on the defence of the seas around India.⁸ Napoleon claimed solidarity with Tipu of Mysore in his fight against British expansion on the Indian subcontinent, and this in turn gave the new governor-general Lord Wellesley an incentive to increase British control across southern India, especially in Hyderabad and the Carnatic, claiming that only this would prevent serious local instability. For the fi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Maps
• Preliminary Note
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Napoleon, India, and the Battle for Egypt
• Chapter 2: Sealing off Egypt and the Red Sea
• Chapter 3: Striving for Leverage in Baghdad
• Chapter 4: Filling the Arabian Vacuum: Steam, the Arabs, and the Defence of India in the 1830s
• Chapter 5: Britain, Egypt, and Syria in the Heyday of Mehmet Ali
• Chapter 6: Constantinople, London, the Eastern Crisis, and the Middle East
• Chapter 7: The Brief History of British Religious Sectarianism in Syria and Kurdistan
• Chapter 8: Confining the Sectarian Problem: Syria, Kurdistan, France, and the Porte
• Chapter 9: Stratford Canning and the Politics of Christianity and Islam
• Chapter 10: The Ring of Steam, the Lands of Islam, and the Search for Order
• Chapter 11: The British Corridor in Egypt
• Chapter 12: Jerusalem and the Crimean War
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Index