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

6 Narrowing the frontierMid-nineteenth centuryefforts to delimit and map thePerso-Ottoman boundaryRichard SchofieldSUMMARYDrawn for the most part from a familiarity with the relevant British primarysources, this chapter chronicles the vexed process of narrowing the Perso-Ottoman frontier during the mid-nineteenth century. Having established thatthese borderlands had long functioned as a traditional frontier or border march,it then scrutinizes the roles played by Britain and Russia (as the interventionarypowers) and by the Ottoman Empire and Persia as the localsovereigns in these efforts to narrow a disputed and impermanent zone intoa mappable line from 1843 to 1876. It will be argued that Britain’s rationalefor stabilizing the frontier – casting in stone the territorial balance that theyestimated to prevail along the borderlands in 1843 – was not only flawed inprinciple but impossible, in practice, to establish on the ground on any convincingbasis. Britain would demonstrate in all of this that its understandingof a socially and historically complex borderlands was rather superficial.If this was one reason why the project remained unfinished in the mid-1870s,the main one was that Britain and Russia did not possess the authority toimpose the settlement they sought. Nevertheless, one consequence of this imperialproject was to progressively instil a more developed territorial consciousnessor defensiveness in the local disputants, whereby territorial definition in itselfwould become a major component of identity and rivalry. Customary transboundarymovements would increasingly be viewed by central authority inConstantinople and Tehran as unwanted violations of national territory.Essentially, it will be argued that the Ottoman Empire saw participating inefforts to settle the frontier question as a chance not only to familiarize itselfwith remote and inaccessible terrain but to actually materially improve itsterritorial definition at the expense of Persia. For its part, Persia wasnotably pragmatic throughout this episode, believing that it would secure amore favourable definition by supporting the efforts of the mediatingpowers than it would by confronting Constantinople directly.The paper consists of three main chronological sections. First it detailsthe trials and tribulations of the Turco-Persian Boundary Delimitation Commissionbetween 1850 and 1852. Second, it reviews the faltering attempts made