War and Peace in Qajar Persia: Implications Past and ... - Oguzlar.az

142 Lawrence G. PotterPersian officials also offered occasions to intervene, such as at Bushehr andKangan. In most cases the local population simply acquiesced in the changeoverof rule, although at times, such as at Kangan, there was some resistance.According to Curzon: “[The Arabs] have been powerless, from theirown intestine feuds, to resist the encroachments of the Persian authority, whichhas been pushed in these regions with uncompromising vigour, not exemptfrom much injustice and cruelty.” 98 This is perhaps an overstatement; onereason why there often was no popular outcry at the assertion of central authoritywas that such authority weighed very lightly – very small military forces,for example, needed to be dispatched, and in practice many of the samepersonnel probably continued to manage affairs.By the end of the nineteenth century, it was largely for financial reasonsthat the port cities were retaken. The central government, in need of revenueand burdened by large foreign loans, focused on the southern customsas one of the most dependable and lucrative sources of income. In the 1880sthe bureaucracy was rearranged so that control of the ports shifted from Shirazto Tehran, and the customs were farmed personally by the Amin al-Sultan,one of the most powerful men in the country. “The changes which were madein the Customs administration after 1898 constitute the most important seriesof administrative reforms which took place during the reign of Muzaffar al-Din Shah,” according to Burrell. 99Britain played a key role in these events. Above all, it sought to maintainpeace by keeping the Persians and Arabs on their own side of the Gulf. Thusthe British sought to prevent the Persians from retaking Bahrain, and didnot allow Qasimi shaikhs in Sharjah and Ras al-Khaimah to come to therescue of their kinsman in Langeh when he was deposed. Likewise the Britishprevented the Omani sultan from sending an armada to Bushehr, BandarAbbas or Chahbahar, when at various times he was displeased with Persianactions. It is notable that Britain never intervened to protect a local Arabshaikh, starting with the Al Mazkur in 1850 in Bushehr and continuing untilShaikh Khaz‘al in Khuzestan in 1924. British policy was to work with thecentral government, no matter how attractive it might have been to createsmall statelets as it did on the southern shore of the Gulf. Britain could havemade Khuzestan another Kuwait, but it chose not to. British policymakerswere periodically keen to retain the island of Kharg, which they occupiedtwice, as a base, but desisted so as not to provoke Russia.Before the late nineteenth century nobody knew where the border lay inthe south-east and few cared. The British project to build a telegraph, however,inaugurated a new era. It aroused Persian interest in the coast of Baluchistan,which they had hitherto ignored. Suddenly sovereignty over the tiny villageof Jask, for example, became an international issue. Britain drew the borderswith its own interests in mind, i.e. protecting British India and thetelegraph line. However, it drew the border in light of political reality, andacquiesced in the Iranian takeover of Chahbahar. The coming of the telegraphwas, needless to say, of considerable benefit to the Qajar government,