'IRAQ AND THE PERSIAN GULF' [‎326v] (655/862)

PORTS AND INLAND TOWNS
5°8
Between 1694 and 1697 Basra was controlled by Mani, the para
mount shaikh of the Muntafiq confederation, which henceforth was
perpetually blockading the town and cutting the dikes. But generally
Basra was firmly held by governors appointed by the Mamluk Pashas
of Baghdad (p. 259). Between 1720 and 1752 the British East India
Company established itself and the Dutch merchants were ousted;
Italian and French merchants followed on the heels of the British.
A visitation of plague in 1773 was followed by a Persian invasion in
1774, but it needed a two years’ blockade to secure the surrender of
the city; the Company’s agents and vessels retired to the protection of
H.M. ships at Bushire, on one of which Nelson was then serving as a
midshipman An experienced sailor, but not a commissioned officer. . Under continual pressure from the hostile Muntafiq,
then the protectors of Basra, the Persians retired in 1779. Mamluk
rule was restored and the Company’s agents returned.
In the nineteenth century Basra, under regular Ottoman rule,
prospered from the development of steam navigation by Lynch
Brothers on the Tigris. No quays yet existed for ocean steamers,
ships being unloaded in midstream, but by 1914 the vessels of ten
companies, mostly Indian and British, called regularly, and the port
had a total trade worth about £6,000,000 a year.
The construction of the modern port was undertaken by the British
Army after the occupation of Basra in 1914, when it became the
supply base of all the British forces in Iraq. The site selected for the
main wharves was at Maqil, 4 miles above Ashar, where there was
deep water close to the bank. A low-lying area intersected by creeks
and irrigation ditches was raised above flood-level, a continuous
series of wharves, 3,000 feet long, with modern cranage, was built
above Maqil village, backed by a transit area and railway yards linked
to the Basra-Baghdad railway. In April 1920 this new port was
opened for use as a commercial establishment, its new status depend
ing upon the Port of Basra Proclamation 1919 (Provisional), since
incorporated in the laws of Iraq. In 1921 the Basra Port Directorate,
still in British ownership, was placed under the control of the new
Iraqi Government and administered by the Ministry of Finance. By
the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1930 a financially autonomous Port Trust
was to be set up, to which the property of the Port of Basra was to
be transferred. The price paid by the Iraqi Government was the
nominal sum of £540,874. It is administered by a British Port
Director and a Director General of Navigation.
The port, having been built without much regard for costs, required
considerable adaptation before it could be economically worked as a