Annotated Copy of Persia and the Persian Question by George Curzon, with Inserted Papers [‎770v] (1557/1814)

EGYPT.
[April, 1911.
16
by money. And lastly we know that since then
the commanders of British gunboats, acting on
Lord Curzon’s instructions, have more than once inter
vened in the affairs of Koweit, and on one occasion
landed troops to help Mubarak against the attack of
a hostile force sent against him by the Emir of Hail.
This is what we know, but what has never been ex
plained has been the underlying motive of action so
irregular on the part of the Viceroy of India in concert
with the London Foreign Office. I will endeavour to
supply the deficiency of official information, which it
is quite certain Sir Edward Grey will continue his re
fusal of, by relating what I know, not of the text of
the so-called treaty, but of the part it was intended
to play in the Imperial programme of the time, and of
the uses to which it has since been put.
To understand the full import of Colonel Meade’s
mission it is necessary to recall to memory the ideas
and plans and aspirations current at the time among the
young Tory fire-eaters of the day on foreign affairs,
the men in Parliament whom Lord Curzon had been
leading for several years as Under Secretary at the
Foreign Office. The autumn of 1898, which is the date
of Lord Curzon’s assumption of the Viceregal dignity
at Calcutta, may be reckoned as marking the extreme
high-water level of English aggressive imperialism.
The battle of Omdurman had not long been fought,
and it had been followed by the French capitulation in
respect to the Marchand mission at Fashoda. We were
all dancing on the corpse of France, and prepared to
dance upon as many other corpses as we might get
under our heels. As Gordon had been avenged at Khar
toum, so Majuba, the young Tories said, was to be
avenged in South Africa. Egypt had been jockeyed out
of her rights at the recapture of the Soudan. All the
Nile now was to be British from the Equatorial Lakes
to the Mediterranean. Promises of evacuation and
pledges did not count. The only test of legality was
possession, of wisdom success, of morality in a nation
imperial power.
The ideas of these young men were grandiose. Lord
Salisbury had partitioned out North Africa. They who
were of the rising generation would partition out what
remained of the world in Asia. Nay, they would grab Shallow vessel with a projecting bow.
it all. The world was for the strong, for the unscrupu
lous ; and who so strong, so unscrupulous, as they? It
was the Welt-politik Anglicised. France was out of the
running, as were the rest of the Latin nations. The
race for the world’s hegemony lay between the Anglo-
Saxon, the Teuton, and the Slav. They were deter
mined the Anglo-Saxon should be the winner. The im
mediate prospect before them, when they should have
settled the little matter with Kruger, would be to take
advantage of the break-up of the Ottoman Empire,
which they calculated would be at the death of Abdul
Hamid, then believed to be not far off, to grab Shallow vessel with a projecting bow. the
larger portion of the inheritance, Arabia, the Lower
Euphrates, Syria, while, further East, the glory of the
Moghul Empire was to be revived in the person of the
Queen-Empress, and with it the hegemony of Islam,
perhaps the Caliphate.
These, I say, were the dreams of the young men who
looked on Lord Curzon as their most ambitious repre
sentative ; nor can we doubt that they were also present
in his own mind as a thing possible of achievement.
His appointment to India seemed the opening scene of
the new policy, and what more natural than that the
first move in the game should be in the direction of
Arabia and the Persian Gulf The historical term used to describe the body of water between the Arabian Peninsula and Iran. , so as to forestall the
possible competition of Germany and Russia? Lord
Curzon was already well acquainted with Persia; he
had travelled there ; he had written a book about it; and
he understood Gulf politics and the value of the ports
on the Arabian Coast as gates to the interior of the
Peninsula. It was a sore point at the India Office The department of the British Government to which the Government of India reported between 1858 and 1947. The successor to the Court of Directors. that
Midhat had been allowed to recapture all these in the
northern portion of the Gulf for the Sultan. The
Sheykh of the island of Bahreyn had appealed to Eng
land in 1871, and had received naval protection, but
as an island it was of insufficient value for the present
purpose. Koweit alone was without a Turkish garrison
on that side of the Gulf, and might with prompt measures
be secured in English interests. It was the port used by
the tribes of Nejd for their export trade in horses with
Bombay. It was the only practical entrance left for
communication with inner Arabia. Moreover, it was
possessed of a good roadstead, and would be the natural
terminus of any railway which might be run from v the
Mediterranean to the Gulf. There was talk already of
a German line through Asia Minor to Bagdad. There
had been an old scheme of an English one from Alex-
andretta, and enthusiastic imperialists had begun to
think of yet one more imperially important line which
should unite Egypt, now held to be part of the British
Empire, through the northern Arabian desert to the
head of the Gulf and eventually through Southern
Persia and Beluchistan to India, an all-British route for
the future.
These were the objects which cannot but have been
in Lord Curzon’s mind when, as almost his first act as
Viceroy, he sent Colonel Meade to Koweit to repeat
with Mubarak Ibn Sebah the same agreement of
practical if informal protectorate of his territory as that
with Bahreyn, one which should ensure to England
control over the head of the Gulf, the terminus of any
possible railway, a future naval station, and a gate of
communication with the interior of Arabia. These were
certainly the objects of the mission. The uses made of
the position thus obtained are less well known. Apart
from the leverage furnished by the assertion of treaty
rights at Koweit against the German railway company’s
proposal to Mubarak of making its terminus there in
1900, and its re-assertion from time to time with the
same object since, it is not, I think, within general
knowledge, though it is nevertheless a fact, that
Mubarak was made to serve the Indian Government as
a medium of communication with the tribes of Nejd in
the intrigues carried on with them in Lord Curzon’s
time, when English influence was sought to be exerted
in Nejd politics during the wars which broke out among
them consequent on the death of the Emir Mohammed
Ibn Rashid of Hail. Mubarak’s tribal sympathies were
with the revolt against Mohammed’s successors, and as
these successors were supported by the Ottoman
Government, he was made the means of communicating
the assurance of English sympathy to the revolting
tribes, and, what is more, of providing them with arms.
I make this statement with the assurance of what I
may call personal knowledge, having received my in
formation of the fact from more than one Arabian
source at the time alluded to. It is not a little amusing,
recollecting what I then learned as to the rifles supplied
through Koweit, not ten years ago, to the tribes of
Arabia, to listen now to Lord Curzon declaiming in the
House of Lords against the nefarious traffic in arms
carried on by French firms through Muscat with the
Persian and Baluchi coast for use in Afghanistan.
As far as I know, these intrigues ceased with Lord
Curzon’s retirement from India and the change of
Government at home in 1905, while the glorious plan of
partitioning the Ottoman Empire to England’s profit
has vanished from the Foreign Office’s imperial pro
gramme. The “ Outlook ” and the “ Pall Mall
Gazette,” representing the cruder aspirations of the
Tory party, still talk from time to time of these things
and of the all-British railway from the Suez Canal
through Northern Arabia and Persia to the Indus. But
it is with diminished faith ; and Sir Edward Grey’s latest
pronouncements seem to indicate that they are no longer
seriously entertained in Downing Street. Sir Edward
is silent about it all, but he would do better, I think, to
make a clean breast of the whole of the Koweit intrigue,
which, after all, was none of his, for, if accompanied
with an act of contrition for the past and a sincere pur
pose of amendment, it would do more than anything
else to restore Ottoman confidence in British good faith.
But this, I suppose, we can hardly expect. I offer the
idea to him nevertheless as a valuable suggestion, and
one which may save him and his successors at the
Foreign Office much trouble in a not very remote
future.