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

152 Richard SchofieldImperial incentives to narrow the frontierIncentives and opportunities to narrow the frontier derived from an unprecedenteddecade of European diplomatic cooperation (much of it concerningMiddle Eastern issues), the developing interests of Russia and Britain in thesouthern and northern ends of the borderlands and genuine fears that thesewere about to be impacted by another serious bout of Perso-Ottoman hostilities,especially following the Ottoman sacking of Mohammerah in 1837. 13With Russia desiring stability in its recently-acquired Caucasian provincesand Britain coveting a more stable Mesopotamia into which to project itseconomic interests, narrowing the Perso-Ottoman frontier became a prioritizedEuropean project in the early 1840s. Britain and Russia agreed momentarilyto see eye to eye on the Eastern Question in December 1839, while unitywas briefly restored to the Big Five in Europe (Russia, Britain, France, Prussiaand Austria) following their success in cutting Mehmet Ali Pasha down tosize with the settlement of the Egypt crisis at the turn of the 1840s. Havingconcluded a commercial convention with Constantinople in August 1838,Britain added its name (with Russia and the Ottoman Empire) to multilateralconventions aimed at pacifying the Levant and establishing a regimefor the Turkish straits during 1840–1841. This would be followed immediatelyby the conclusion of an Anglo-Persian Treaty of Commerce in October1841. 14 So the conditions for intervention in the frontier question were asgood as they were ever likely to be.Brought in as mediatory powers onto a quadripartite boundary commissionin May 1843, Britain and Russia hoped to guide their hosts towardsa more definitive and binding settlement of their territorial dispute and tonarrow the frontier zone into a mappable line. In fact, once they had hastilyrecognized a rudimentary territorial status quo in the borderlands from MountArarat in the north to the Persian Gulf in the south – which was to be thebasis of their loose treaty definition of the land boundary four years later,most of their energies were spent determining the ownership of the portof Mohammerah (the contemporary Iranian city of Khorramshahr) on theShatt al-Arab. 15 The merits of the competing claims to Mohammerah hadbeen neatly encapsulated by Sir Stratford Canning, Britain’s Ambassadorin Constantinople in April 1844: “The whole results in a presumption thatthe original territorial right is in favour of Turkey, and the right of conquestand possession is in favour of Persia.” 16 When Britain and Russia agreedthat the port at this stage possessed greater linkages with Persia than theOttomans, the die was cast for a new territorial accommodation. 17 Most importantly,this observation meant that a river was defined in the Erzurumboundary treaty of May 1847 to comprize the southernmost constituent ofthe Perso-Ottoman boundary, whereas the Shatt al-Arab had found nomention in the previous Perso-Ottoman treaties already referred to. Thiswas not considered especially problematic since already, by this stage,the “superiority” of the natural boundary (i.e. that following physical