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An excerpt from, "Promised Lands: The British and the Ottoman Middle East" by Jonathan Parry, Princeton University Press, 2022, Pg. 374 - 384:
Very quickly after 1798, most local British officials formed the view that the Ottoman authorities were incapable of providing good government, because of institutionalised corruption and a short-termist approach to land management. The Islamic caliphate was a husk of its former self, its old military fervour softened by decadence, its stolid fatalism unsuited to modern economic opportunities. It lacked popular confidence; it could not secure order across vast swathes of its territory. Many Britons also instinctively assumed that the Porte remained more hostile to Britain than to France or Russia: hence Rich's extraordinary animosity against its influence at Baghdad. Once British paramountcy was secured in the Gulf and around Aden, by the 1840s, naval officers were also anxious to counter the Ottomans' revival of claims to sovereignty in places to which they had no practical title. Those claims would allow local chiefs to acknowledge a rival source of power, which would undermine British authority, or at least make it much more expensive to reassert.So British agents tended to see the Ottomans as imperialists, and themselves as helping to secure local justice. They wanted to offer protection where necessary to the Arabs, to the Lebanese and Kurdish mountaineers, and to the Jews of Palestine. They saw present-day overtaxing pashas as the latest in a series of invaders who had destroyed the region's potential. Hugh Rose lamented the misgovernment of Baghdad, which had "made a desert of a garden, and excited revolt, where conciliation and prudence might have made of the benighted Arabs of the Irak, grateful adherents of the Sultan and useful servants of the state." The Turk had blighted the garden of the Old World with a poisonous upas tree.' A major reason why Harford Jones, Viscount Valentia, and Thomas Perronet Thompson respected the Wahhabi (and why Jones and Valentia at times feared them) was the contrast that they offered to Turkish indolence, materialism, and brutality. Wahhabi puritanism seemed authentic and elemental; it also illustrated that Arabs were less corrupted by money than their Ottoman overlords. Jones ridiculed Mehmet Ali's assumption that they could be permanently destroyed "by his gold, rather than the valour of his troops"; they were bound to rise again. For the same reason, John Lewis Burckhardt assumed that the Ottomans would eventually be driven out of the Hijaz. Perronet Thompson thought Wahhabism a "great struggle for freedom" against "Turkish domination." Arabs also seemed much more reliable fighters than the Turks, and much more willing to cooperate with British commanders against common enemies. Observing them at Mocha and Hudavda, Katharine Elwood appreciated their "wild independence and ... manly frankness..., which is very different from the obsequiousness and servility of other Oriental nations." Relative to the Turks, their "vivaciousness, astuteness, and curiosity [were] quite European."This inextinguishable temperamental independence suggested that the Arabs would not easily be subordinated by the Ottomans, France, or Russia. So British agents realised the benefits of cultivating that independence. During the campaigns of 1798-1801, they used money and military power to win Arab cooperation, paying promptly and regularly for their services. They prided themselves on their reputation for honouring fnancial obligations. In the 1820s and 1830s, the Indian Navy officers spent years surveying the seas around Arabia, communicating with the tribes, and enjoying the local food. They identified an Arab avarice that could be usefully harnessed, and a basic humanity that, if they reciprocated it, could be nurtured. British respect for Arabs had strict limits. Had a coherent Arab empire-state been possible, it would have created strategic problems for Britain. There was brief concern that Mehmet Ali might manage to found one: it might incite Islamists to destabilise British India, or provide the only means for France or Russia to buy its way into the region, by bribing the Egyptian viceroy. But Mehmet Ali was no Arab himself, and by 1840 the raggedness of his attempts to control Arabia was apparent; the threat disappeared.From the 1830s, steam power, especially in Mesopotamia, was a valuable aid in intimidating the Arabs into appreciating British might. It also promised to strengthen the authority of the pasha of Baghdad, which plague had weakened, if he was willing to accept judicious British assistance. This would boost order and stability in the pashalik against external threats. Ostensibly, these threats came from Mehmet Ali. In reality, the main concern was Russia, and to an extent Persia, which seemed so vulnerable to Russian pressure. Baghdad and the Gulf became stages on which Britain would display its might, modernity, and confidence in order to defeat Russian ambitions, and to remind Russians that their influence at Constantinople itself was of little local consequence. In 1838-40, Britain pursued the same forward policy in Aden and the Gulf as in Afghanistan.In strengthening its own power in the Middle East in the 1830s against potential enemies, Britain could claim to be propping up Ottoman sovereign authority there. Yet, at the same time, the Middle Eastern part of the Ottoman Empire was being shaped into an outwork of Indian defence. In India too, steam power on the rivers was used to move troops about, and to impress locals and enemies; the first railway followed in 1849. The ministers of the Liberal governments of the 1830s and 1846-52 saw the struggle with Russia as a global one. Palmerston inherited through Huskisson the Dundasite principle that a coherent strategy was needed, spanning Europe and Asia, to combat the challenges of European rivals. The Grant brothers (his fellow Huskissonites) and Hobhouse (his India secretary) shared that vision. Steam and commercial power could give Britain more strength across Eurasia than Dundas ever imagined possible. These men were not seriously alarmed that Russia could penetrate Indian borders; the main concern was always to assert Britain's regional power in order to subjugate potential rebels within India itself. In 1830, the East India Company admitted that its fear was "not so much actual invasion by Russia as the moral effect which would be produced among our own subjects in India .. . by the continued apprehension of that event."This idea of strengthening India through technology can perhaps be seen as a liberal governing strategy. Scholars of imperial political thought have valiantly tried to define a "Liberalism" that can be applied to India in this period, but this can be done only by adopting an oddly narrow definition of Liberalism, based merely on the writings of a few idealistic thinkers, rather than on the study of what Liberal governments did and said. The founding myth of British Liberalism as a political movement, after the 1832 Reform Act. was that it could provide good government because it understood how to retain popular confidence. It could integrate the British nation as an effective and politically active community; it could also give Catholics proper political representation, and therefore pursue a union of consent with Ireland. Then, by harnessing national energies, a Liberal British state would lead the world against a Russia that after 1828 was aggressive as well as repressive. Strong government by popular consent would always defeat blustering autocracy. It followed that Liberalism in that sense----political Liberalism, the creed of British Liberal governments----could not be applied to India, because its core was effective political representation, whereas India remained a principle garrison state.Nonetheless, the Palmerston-Hobhouse strategy involved standing up to Russia, and to internal Indian critics, by expressing the strength of the British state in India---in terms of financial power, technological mastery, administrative competence, and good order, translated into military efficiency. The expectation was that a feeble, antiquated regime would quail in the face of applied modernity. So the Indian army was mobilised boldly and proactively on the North-West Frontier. The result was the Afghan War, which was a disaster in several ways. Even so, it demonstrated British intent unmistakeably, both to Afghan rulers and to Russia, and it provided the iustification for the conquest and pacification of Sind and the Punjab in the 1840s. This strategy was criticised then, as it can be now, but its proponents continued to believe that it consolidated Indian securitv on its western flank.In the Middle East, as in India, an additional hope for steam was that it might develop commerce on the coasts and rivers, increasing revenue and strengthening popular loyalty. These visions melded British capitalist confidence with romantic recollections of the region's ancient prosperity. The imaginations of Popham and Wellsted in the Red Sea, Lynch and Jones in Baghdad, and travellers to Palestine like Ashley and Lindsay far outstripped the reality. One reason why hopes of economic prospects were frustrated was the nature of Ottoman rule, except in Mehmet Ali's Egypt. The steamships on the Euphrates were, as Ainsworth wrote, "like a vision of future glory," rather than effective weapons of transformation---they were too few and the obstacles of governance too great. The same applied to most talk of economic development, such as Jewish settlement schemes in Palestine. Moses Montefiore seems to have considered them premature, and Palmerston became less optimistic about getting the Ottomans to facilitate them. Capitalists needed more security for landholding than the Porte would grant, while most emigrants were too elderly and spiritually inclined to become agricultural entrepreneurs. Officials could only hope that British influence over local rulers might gradually strengthen order and offer security for investment.Though hardly any British officers in, or visitors to, the Middle East had any immediate aspiration to govern it, they could not help thinking about the prospect of doing so, because, at least before 1840, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire was almost universally expected. Such thoughts were naturally affected by the experience of British rule in India. In the British imagination, India was becoming a land of law against age-old oriental despotism. The Permanent Settlement of 1793 claimed to defend property rights against arbitrary power. In 1813, Robert Smith asserted that "the meanest rights of the meanest native stand on the solid base of law and justice." The reality was a legal jumble that owed a lot to local customs. The flaws in Indian justice arrangements legitimised resistance in some respects, yet allowed uncontrollable lower courts to condone acts of white violence. However, the effectiveness of the myth was often noted by British officials in the Middle East, who reported local Arabs contrasting Ottoman misrule with Britain's reputation for legal fairness in India.In one important respect, the Middle East seemed more likely to be receptive to the principles of good government than India had been. It had produced Christianity and had been governed by Roman law, whereas India had always been regarded in Britain as culturally alien. India was not directly ruled by government and Parliament before 1858---largely because so many British people insisted that their politicians would be corrupted by the increased patronage and financial powers that direct responsibility for managing India's poisoned wealth would give them. It could be brought under direct British government only after the 1857 rebellion, once anger at the mistakes of its arrogant and irresponsible bureaucracy outweighed declining fears about "old corruption." In 1801, the British soldiers in Egypt observed with astonishment the wasteful stately luxury of their Indian army counterparts: they jeered that they were "the army of Darius." Bombay civil servants bullied Rich, Stafford Haines, and Felix Jones with the callous cruelty of the desk-bound autocrat.By contrast, the Middle East excited imaginations because of the familiarity of its history. It goes without saying that the familiarity was misconceived and romanticised: that is not the point. Visions of improvement gave officials some sense of purpose and identity in what were otherwise discouraging and discomforting conditions. The British army in Egypt had to endure ophthalmia, sand lice, and fleas. Lax quarantine procedures and inadequate medicine alarmed all travellers. The plague of 1831 ravaged Baghdad as if it were a modern Babylon. In a delirium caused by fever, Raymond Wellsted shot himself in the mouth in Muscat and never recovered physically or mentally. One naval officer, in the intolerable heat of the Gulf summer, saw his men "die in the utmost agony and raving mad, from exposure to the sun, after a few hours' illness." Yet that same officer charted every stop of his expedition by reference to the record left by Alexander's naval commander Nearchus 2,150 years before, and was pleased to note the continuing accuracy of his account of fishing practices.'When Mackintosh, Rich, and Chesney thought about Baghdad, they thought about Alexander the Great using his courage and judgment to humiliate the decadent Orientals farther east. Baghdad was still threatened by the Persians and by the Russians; could it be saved for civilisation? In 1801, William Hamilton hoped to bring Egypt back into the greater Europe that the Romans had mapped out. Could the British help to supply it with tax reductions and peace--the policies for which Ptolemy V was thanked in the address preserved on the Rosetta Stone that Hamilton secured for the British Museum? In 1849, Layard claimed that the ancient civilisation that he had unearthed at Nineveh showed "the debt which the West owes to the East'" but also implied that the West should now repay the debt by a civilising mission to the modern inhabitants of those countries. In 1854, Charles Kingsley argued that the Romans had established the only acceptable type of empire, governing "with tolerable justice" Syrians and Egyptians who could not govern themselves, and making them "better and more prosperous people, by compelling them to submit to law." Was it visionary to think that law might be re-established throughout these lands, by the Romans successors, uniting West and East as they had done?The Indian Navy's interest in developing steam power and commerce on the rivers of Mesopotamia was based on its unrivalled fertility and prosperity 2,500 years earlier. In the same way, the appeal of Aden to Haines and his fellow officers owed much to their study of the trading power of ancient Hadramaut and the Queen of Sheba. All that was needed to restore this prosperity was irrigation and commerce. Basic technology would turn deserts back into the gardens they had been--the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, or even the Garden of Eden, associated with Qurna near Basra, Here, according to Wellsted, "man in the image of God was first created and here in his most perfect form is he yet found." Water was the region's key life-giving ingredient, and not just in the phials that tourists brought home from the River Jordan. British travellers imagined Christ preaching to thousands of happy, hard-working families around the fertile shores and well-stocked waters of the Sea of Galilee, in contrast to the rotting carcasses of the Dead Sea. Irrigation and steam power would remove the universal blight of depopulation and declining agricultural revenues. Perhaps they could also empower effective communities that would value their property and would respect orderly government.Some British visitors and commentators therefore assumed that marauding Arab tribes could be persuaded to settle on riverbanks to tend crops and livestock peacefully and productively. As they had never been slaves, they would naturally take to being industrious free farmers. Other observers saw the Arabs less as participants in a potential orderly commercial future than as reminders of a primeval, divinely ordered past. They noted their established laws and customs, and their patriarchalism, infused with a healthy respect for wisdom and for tribal opinion. For Kinglake and Disraeli, they offered a window into "the Elder World." There was some admiration for the resistance of primitive desert tribes to morally corrupting urban values, though also some fear that Ottoman misgovernment and the arrival of wealthy Europeans had tempted them into a predatory cupidity. Ainsworth asserted that the "mental privileges of the Arabs," the "descendants from the most noble stocks of the human race," had not declined, but they had been "overwhelmed by moral despotism and political insecurity." Consciousness of their biblical ancestry was ever-present in the background. In his History of the Jews in 1830, Henry Milman used modern accounts of the Arabs to interpret the biblical material about Abraham's marriage arrangements. George Rose attributed the Arabs' tradition of circumcision to the Abrahamic divine covenant and its theme of purification.The deserts of the Middle East were where God had given laws to his people to make them a society. British travellers climbed what the guides claimed was Mount Sinai---even though their biblical knowledge told them that the topography was not quite right---so that they could imagine how it must have felt to receive divine guidance so immediately. In the Arabian desert, Muhammad thought that he too had heard God's iniunctions, which inspired him to devote his life to waging war on the sins and errors of mankind. Reading Gibbon in Baghdad in 1809 taught Mary Rich to admire "Mahomet and the first Arabian heroes. Gibbon, like a number of eighteenth-century writers took pleasure in rebelling against conventional Christian abuse of Islam. He presented Muhammad as a crusader for a simple, inspiring, charitable monotheism, which had quickly taken root in much of the world. His emphases on the social benefits and proven permanence of Islam were taken up by several others, including by Thomas Carlyle in 1840, in one of his most famous and influential lectures. "These Arabs believe their religion, and try to live by it! ... ---believing it wholly, fronting Time with it, and Eternity with it ... Belief is great, life-giving. The history of a Nation becomes fruitful, soul-elevating, great, so soon as it believes." Carlvle had also been influenced by Edward Lane's Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, which showed him how deeply Islamic assumptions were embedded in Egyptian daily life. In the Middle East, as in India, some British intellectuals became orientalist scholars, keen to understand better the history of local cultures.Of course, many Victorians continued to hold a more conventionally dismissive view of Islam, and two opposing answers were always given to the question of how far it was compatible with good government. Many who visited the East only briefly, such as Richard Cobden, had already decided to blame Ottoman regime failings on their "brutalising religion" that "disdain[ed] all improvement and labour." The "impostor of Mecca" defended slavery and polygamy, and taught Turks to govern by savagery and the sword, spreading devastation and pestilence over their realms. Likewise, Addison's journey confirmed his view that a code of law based on the precepts of the Quran could not be a proper legal code. Claudius Rich, who saw his years in Baghdad as training for a high-level post in imperial India, continued to look down on Islam as incompatible with improvement because it rejected all modern developments in "science, art, history, manners." Many visitors were pleased to note that it seemed to be losing strength in Ottoman realms, though this claim was usually based not on Middle Eastern experience but on the growing relative influence and prosperity of Christians in the Balkans and the Levant.Other observers, however, were very clear that Islam should and must be the basis of any reform of governance in the East. Ambassador Ponsonby welcomed the 1839 Edict of Güilhane for several reasons, but fundamentally because it would strengthen the sultan's authority as Islamic caliph, by increasing Muslim popular confidence in him. An influential body of thinkers searched for a legal code to which Muslims could relate, that would supply this confidence and so give the regime the strength necessary to defeat French or Russian threats. When secretary to the Constantinople embassy in the 1830s, David Urquhart argued that the Ottoman Empire should strip its corruptions away to reveal its original foundation on Arab governance principles of decentralisation, free trade, and direct taxation. His central argument was that Arab culture placed governments in subordination to a comprehensible and simple Islamic legal code that would restore Muslim confidence and revivify the empire. The Arabophile Thomas Perronet Thompson devised the 1820 Gulf treaty, the foundation of the Trucial system, on the assumption that the British and the Gulf shaykhs could form an alliance based on a mutual respect for law. Both men were followers of Jeremy Bentham, who was concerned to secure the independence, viability, and vigour of Islamic regimes. An indigenous patriotism, founded on a clear, morally acceptable legal philosophy, would defend them against collapse and Russian imperialism. The difficulty in assessing Mehmet Ali was whether he respected law and civilisation or not. British travellers witnessed first-hand the security he brought to the small section of the country that they visited, and they admired his gestures towards European civilisation. Yet in other ways he was a tyrannical pharaoh. The Benthamite Bowring admitted that he was a despot, but argued that his strong, vigorous rule offered the best of both worlds, giving Muslims patriotic and Christians tolerance.In practice, if law and order were to be imposed in a morally aceeptable way, British officials usually assumed that they would have to be involved. Britain tended to act as a non-sectarian power, believing that it could hold the ring between religious groups while respecting Islamic culture. By contrast, hardly any British consuls in the Middle East regarded the promotion of Christianity as a priority. They imagined that it might well revive in the wake of eventual economic development, but that would take a long time. There was a lot of British Christian interest in the Middle East, but it was generated overwhelmingly by domestic opinion. Bishops and missionaries alike were brought up on the idea that early Christianity had spread like wildfire across Asia and Africa from its original colonies in Syria and Kurdistan. They hoped against hope that this could happen again. The Church of England proposed missions to the Nestorians in Kurdistan. Evangelicals also advocated the restoration of the Jews to Palestine in the hope of facilitating Christ's Second Coming. Palmerston nodded to this sectarian pressure briefly in 1840-41, fearing that other powers would successfully use their own denominationa strategy to win local predominance. The consequences were counterproductive tensions between British, French, and American religious missions, which severely exacerbated local conflicts in Lebanon and Kurdistan. This was not in British interests. The crisis of 1841-43 made clear that, unlike France, Austria, Russia, Britain had no significant Christian denominational interests to defend in the East. Protestantism remained a lightweight political force: there were two Anglican churches in the whole Middle East in 1854. Britain seemed better off using its influence to press the Ottomans to protect the interests of all oppressed religious minorities--mostly non-Christian ones.
