In December 1833, the ship bringing in the Egyptian obelisk that can still be found adorning the Place de la Concorde in Paris, a ship fittingly baptised the Luxor, entered the Seine estuary on its journeyâs final leg. Purpose-built and shallow-draught, she had first sailed two years earlier with the crew of workmen and engineers that were to take down and haul over the 230-ton monument from its original home. Because she was unable to navigate the shallows at the mouth of the Nile, and by construction of weak seaworthiness, she had been towed out of Egypt by a steamer named the Sphinx. In April of the same year, a different vessel altogether had appeared before the crowded shores of Constantinople, on the Bosphorus: the Russian admiral ship Tsarina Maria. The warship was the leader of the second squadron in a three-part amphibious operation designed to shield the Turkish capital from an advancing, enemy Egyptian army. She had been sent, from Odessa, on Russian initiative but with the weary approval of the Sultan, and she would assist, along with the troops she brought, in upholding the Sultanâs peace. Another four months earlier, the British Foreign Office had acknowledged receipt of a report by a Captain Francis Chesney on the opening of the great Mesopotamian rivers to commercial navigation. After further preparation and an intervening parliamentary enquiry, Chesney would mount an expedition consisting of two steamers duly named the Tigris and the Euphrates. The ships, launching from England in 1835, were to chart the riversâ dangerous waters and assess the feasibility of a service connecting the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf.
The Luxor, the Tsarina Maria, the Euphrates: three ships, three visions of the European role in the Orient. Franceâs mission in the Middle East was to be spearheaded by scientific endeavour and by the reawakening from slumber of its great nations, here symbolised by the retrieval of the ancient temple monument. For the Russian tsar, and with him the allied northern courts of Prussia and Austria, the priority was the preservation of the existing, legitimate order on the Bosphorus, by force if necessary. The British vision, in turn, was for civilisation to be carried in the hull of its merchantmen, to spread to Asia and elsewhere through trade and development. These three differing interpretations of Europeâs Oriental destiny would, by the end of the decade, come to clash dramatically.
The Eastern Crisis of 1839â41, originating in a conflict between the Pasha of Egypt and his Ottoman overlord, shook Europe to the point of placing it on the brink of a general war. It was, according to at least one historian, the most dangerous war scare since the end of the Napoleonic wars. 1 Its indirect effects included an upsurge in nationalism known as the Rhine Crisis that was a landmark in FrancoâGerman hostility and in the movement towards German unification. Perhaps most importantly, however, it was a key step in the return of frontline European involvement in the Middle East after centuries of disengagement. The occasion for joint Austro-British landings on the Syrian coast in 1840, it was the first instance of coordinated Middle Eastern intervention by the European powers in the modern era. 2 Closely followed by another conflict in the shape of the Crimean War and, later in the century, by creeping colonisation, it was moreover a return that would prove durable.
At the heart of the crisis was a bid for independence by Mehemet Ali, Pasha of Egypt and master of such other Ottoman lands as Syria and the Hejaz. In 1839, when this bid was resisted and the Sultan attempted, and failed, to wrest back Syria militarily, the European great powers took matters into their own hands. While the French supported the Pasha, though, the other four powersâAustria, Britain, Prussia, and Russiaâfavoured curbing the Egyptian rebel in the interest of Ottoman integrity. The diplomatic bargaining dragged on inconclusively for a year. Finally, though, the four powers agreed against French wishes to commission an armed intervention on the ground, leading not only to the curbing of Mehemet Ali but to the generalised war scare of 1840â1.
This story has so far only been told in the conventional terms of strategic state interest. Diplomatic surveys segregate the Eastern Crisis from its political and ideological context and paint it purely as a matter of geography and great-power competition. âThe heart of the problem was the Straitsâ, writes Charles Webster, the author of the great Palmerstonian foreign-policy epic dealing with the 1830s. 3 That Lord Palmerston, the British foreign secretary at the time of the Eastern Crisis, had for the better part of the decade been acting in support of Liberal regimes in Europe, such as in the Iberian peninsula or Belgium, is judged irrelevant to his Ottoman policy. Nineteenth-century international history in general tends to be primarily interested in tactics or even point-scoring among leading statesmen and diplomats. How conflicts were negotiated in chancelleries and embassies, and who outwitted or outmanoeuvred whom tends to take priority, as an object of concern, over the roots of the conflict under the lens, and this has especially been the case of the clash of 1839â41. 4 Yet on what grounds the great powers chose to make their first, modern-era collective intervention in a Middle Eastern conflict surely is of prime historical concern.
Paul Schroeder distinguishes, in the period, the emergence of a new international system in Europe through the prioritisation of continental stability. 5 This contains the likelihood, already, of the elevation by the powers of European over local concerns in Middle Eastern affairs. As others have furthermore noted, âthe [European] continent was now split into two ideologically divided campsâ. 6 In the congress years after 1815 and especially in the 1830s, Europe had increasingly become riven by the tug-of-war between Liberalism and ReactionâLiberalism being understood here in the contemporary sense, emphasising the Rights of Man, civic equality, freedom of the press, secularism, and representative governmentâwith impact on most if not all of the foreign policy conflicts and interventions involving the great powers on their home continent. 7 In the 1830s, indeed, a new Quadruple Alliance (Britain, France, Portugal, Spain) formally faced a Conservative pact reconstituted at MĂŒnchengratz (Austria, Prussia, Russia). The European powers, and within each state their domestic opinions, were fundamentally divided. Is it conceivable that this would neither have affected the outlook nor influenced the decisions of the statesmen who determined the course of the Eastern Crisis?
Nor should a broader climate be ignored of renewed interest in and excitement about the Orient. Beyond the prevailing political configuration, the crisis can be traced to improving routes from Europe into the Middle East, in particular thanks to the first steamships. It took place after two decades in which trade and news had been crossing the Mediterranean at an increasing pace, and in which visitors had been enjoying ever easier physical access to the region, a phenomenon brought home to the public by a blossoming English, French, and German travel literature. Perhaps crucially, and not wholly coincidentally, the Orient had captured European and especially Romantic imaginations anew. This was the era of Goetheâs EastâWest Divan (1827), of Victor Hugoâs Les Orientales (1829), of Pushkinâs Fountain of Bakhchisaray (1824). In painting, Orientalism was taking its first steps. In countless fashionable written and painted works, the European public was rediscovering the mystery, the frisson of Western Christendomâs old alter ego. In the academic field, many of the Mediterranean and Asiaâs ancient and sacral languages were being translated and their classical works popularised in what the cultural historian Raymond Schwab famously termed an Oriental Renaissance. 8 The Orient, the Middle East were once again being made available to a European public for which representations of them and attention to them had long been only occasional and sparse. The region was being brought closer and had become important again in European eyes, making it more likely to rise also on the priority lists of chancelleries.
Furnished with an increasing yet still limited flow of information about a region none of them had ever visited, the main European decision-makers were sure to absorb some of the tropes of this new-found vogue. At the very least, they were at risk of adopting the often overblown expectations it fostered. In the pithy words of an ageing Lord Melbourne, a European dispute about the Middle East was only likely to âinflame imaginations wonderfullyâ. 9 The Orient, to the contenders of the Eastern Crisis, existed indeed foremost as object of fantasy, as a space unencumbered by prosaic European realities, ready to fire ever-bolder conceptions of state interest. It is a commonplace of the literature on Orientalism that European meddling in Asia found its grounding in academic and artistic productions on the Orient and the civilising discourse that emerged from them. One need not slavishly cling to the model expounded thirty-five years ago by Edward SaĂŻd, in which Orientalist literature acted as a basis for domination and a prelude to colonisation. 10 It is noteworthy, indeed, that in 1839â41 France on one side and Britain on the other supported an independent Egypt and a viable Ottoman Empire, not colonial conquests as the SaĂŻdian model at its most basic expression would lead to expect. 11 Yet surely these discourses and the productions on which they drew were well placed to inform and be found of relevance by the statesmen who engaged their respective countries in the TurcoâEgyptian conflict.
The traditional view by which nineteenth-century great-power relations centred around the defence of sets of hard interests is meanwhile conditioned by the material on which the histories that expound it have relied. Whether on the topic of the Eastern Question, as it became labelled, or on the changing map of Europe itself, this material has chiefly consisted of the consular correspondence plus the occasional political memoir. But reliance on consular archives carries its own set of fundamental yet often unexamined assumptions. To produce detailed and well-documented accounts of the blow-by-blow of diplomatic sparring that characterises international affairs is a worthy endeavour in itself. When accounting for the broader diplomatic stakes, however, a narrow focus on consular data creates a double problem. First, consular archives are typically voluminous and well preserved, creating an impression of comprehensiveness, a self-sufficiency that encourages the relative neglect of context. Second, and crucially, the consular correspondence was by nature and of necessity preoccupied with means, with process, and with bargaining far more than with objectives, let alone motives.
Historians basing themselves solely on these archives tend to assume that policy is led by interests which, because they are scarcely ever or only tangentially defined in the correspondence, they suppose must be commercial, strategic, or colonial. Alan Sked, though his book on the contemporary international system leaves scope elsewhere to national contexts and prevailing ideologies, writes of the crisis, âThe truth was, rather, that British and French interests clashed. [âŠ] French support of Mehemet Aliâs Egypt appeared to threaten British trade in the Levant and the Arabian Gulf.â 12 But did French commercial interests in Egypt justify threatening war with the combined other four powers? Franceâs trade with Egypt was actually negligible, estimated at FRF8.5 million by Vernon Puryear compared to a supplementary naval budget for the Mediterranean alone of FRF10 million for 1839. 13 According to a contemporary observer, France was only Egyptâs fifth tradin...