'Persia and the Persian Question by the Hon. George Nathaniel Curzon, M.P.' [‎206] (241/714)

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PERSIA
which is now so advantageously utilised by our rivals. I regard
the history of British commercial intercourse with Persia as one of
the most remarkable chapters in the little-known or forgotten
annals of this country ; and at a later stage I shall have something
to say of the indomitable gallantry with which, in ages when
merchants required to wield the sword almost as deftly as the pen,
the representatives of English trading companies carried the flag,
and the merchandise, and the high name of Great Britain into
lands where all risked and many lost their lives in each venture,
and whence those that returned were welcomed with no plaudits
from crowded halls, and received no medals from royal societies.
Among the ideas that fired the imagination of John Elton, the
gifted but unstable Englishman, who himself both created and
destroyed that revival of the British Caspian trade in the middle
of the eighteenth century, whose history has been so minutely
recorded by one of the prominent actors in the scene, Jonas
Hanway, was that of establishing a British factory An East India Company trading post. at Meshed, and
of importing, via Astrabad, the woollen cloths of London, which
were to be exchanged at the capital of Khorasan for the fabled
wealth of the East. With what a grim irony we now read the
sanguine words in which he recommended his plan to the British
Minister at St. Petersburg
The British merchants cannot have any formidable rivals to contend
with or to apprehend, in the trade from Meshed to Bokhara. They can
never be supplanted in this trade so long as they secure a passage for
their goods through the Empire of Russia, and a freedom of navigation
on the Caspian, both of which it will be the interest of the sovereign of
Russia to grant to the subjects of Great Britain. 1
How this too fanciful picture of a generous and unsuspecting
Russia and a money -making England failed of realisation will be
told later on. Here I will relate only the brief history of its
application to Meshed. Hanway himself penetrated as far as
Astrabad, in December 1743, with the merchandise which he
proposed to transport from thence by caravan to Meshe , u ie
got no further, for during his stay in the city a rebellion bio -e ou
against Nadir Shah, his goods were seized and plundered, and e
was within an ace of being sold in sla\er} to the
Two other factors, however, of the Russian or Muscovy ompany
1 Historical Account of British 'Trade over the Caspian, by Jonas Ha y
vol. i. pp. 37-39.