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

Consolidation of Iran’s frontier 143for the shah could now exercise much closer supervision over far-flung partsof his empire, including the southern ports. The Khan of Bampur, the lastmajor Persian outpost in the south-east, henceforth had to pay much closerattention to the wishes of Tehran. According to Kashani-Sabet:If the boundary negotiations accomplished anything for the Iranians, itwas their success in providing them with an excuse for mining myth andhistory to preserve Iran’s precious domains, thus unleashing ardent culturalsentiments in the struggle to protect their Iranian identity and theterritory that embodied it. 100The late nineteenth century was the end of the era of autonomous Arabprincipalities along the Iranian coast. The leases by which Arab shaikhs wereauthorized to rule, and paid Tehran to do so, were now a relic of the past.Persia was now much stronger than Oman or the small Arab principalitieson the Gulf ’s southern shore. As the Qajar government modernized and centralized,it was inevitable the Gulf coast, as other parts of the country, wouldbe increasingly subject to the will of Tehran. After 1888, there is no recordof political relations or correspondence between the Tehran government andthe independent Arab principalities. 101 The final chapter of the story ofregional powers resuming control over their coastline came in 1958, whenthe Sultan of Oman sold the enclave of Gwadar to Pakistan for £3 million.Notes* I would like to thank Richard Schofield for originally suggesting this as a topicof research; Shahnaz Nadjmabadi, for comments on the text; and M. R. Izadyfor preparing the maps.1 L. Lockhart, Nadir Shah: A Critical Study Based Mainly Upon ContemporarySources, rev. edn. (London, 1938; reprint Jalandhar, India: Asian Publishers, 1993),chapter 21. Nadir, with a fleet of 30 ships, had the most powerful Persian armadain the region until modern times.2 M. Niebuhr, Travels through Arabia, and Other Countries in the East, trans. RobertHeron (Edinburgh, 1792; reprint, Reading: Garnet Publishing, 1994), vol. 2,p. 137.3 See here, Keith McLachlan, ed., The Boundaries of modern Iran, The SOAS/GRC Geopolitics Series 2 (London: UCL Press, 1994); Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Frontier Fictions: Shaping the Iranian Nation, 1804–1946 (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1999); and “Boundaries,” in Encyclopædia Iranica,vol. 4 (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1990).4 Malcolm Yapp, “The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” in Alvin J. Cottrell,ed., The Persian Gulf States: A General Survey (Baltimore: The Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1980), p. 52.5 A basic resource for this study is J. G. Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf,Oman and Central Arabia (Calcutta, 1908 and 1915; reprint Gerrards Cross,Buckinghamshire: Archive Editions, 1986), 9 vols. See here vol. 4, pp. 2047–8.6 George N. Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question, vol. 2 (London: Longmans,Green, 1892; reprint, London: Frank Cass, 1966), p. 433.