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

Introduction 7city states, is a situation strikingly reminiscent of the region’s tumult today,a zone of lawlessness in which local populations in the midst of war havelittle incentive to compromize with any of the far-off centres of authority.The concept of a border as a demarcated line between nations (thus representativeof differently affiliated peoples), and which was imposed by externalpowers, is taken up by King’s College geographer Richard Schofield. In hischapter, “Narrowing the frontier: mid-nineteenth-century efforts to delimit,map and demarcate the Perso-Ottoman border”, he describes the tortuousprocess, fraught with intrigue, improbity and foreign schemes, that was involvedin drawing the boundary between what are present-day Iran and Iraq – anundertaking that was repeated by other border commissions organized byboth the British and Russians in Persia’s southeast as well as northeast. Ineffect, the 1847 Treaty of Erzurum, drawn up between Persia and Turkey,delineated the Middle East’s first real negotiated border; in this, the Ottomans“expressly recognized that the anchorage of Mohammerah and the lands eastof the Shatt al-Arab belonging to Persian tribes were Persian territory”. 1Although, like most of the other borders established by negotiation and thework of commissions, the process took years, being subject to dispute andrenegotiation in all cases. However, the process which evolved was to marka significant milestone in the establishment of suzerainty over territory in theMiddle East, and the reversal of the role of war and peace in establishing it.Strict borders, lines upon a page, as Schofield observes, were a European,not a Middle Eastern, concept. Previously, the boundaries of Persia, in thesame way as the other states in the region, were in fact “borderlands”, dozens,if not hundreds, of miles wide, areas of fluctuating patronage and liege thatdid not themselves involve the same suspicion and conflict between adjacentpowers that arose once strict lines were drawn in the sand. The impositionof marked boundaries by Britain and Russia upon the Persian and Ottomanrulers was therefore a European project for European purposes (even thoughthey never succeeded in getting the lines as perfectly settled as they had wished),and had the unexpected result of causing border friction between Persia andher neighbours where previously there had been none. Because of its criticalgeopolitical position, Persia became the first country in the Muslim worldwhose borders were so defined; North Africa would have its borders delineatedonly later in the nineteenth century; the Gulf states and the rest of the MiddleEast would not have their borders ruled until post-World War I.Even so, Schofield describes a process that was neither efficient nor definitive.After many years of negotiation, the western border of Iran remained fungibleand open to dispute, a fact that continues to bedevil its relations withIraq in, for example, the Shatt-al Arab and the marsh areas to its north, andwhich renders the mathematical accuracy of today’s Global PositioningSystem largely irrelevant.More successful was Persia’s own extension of indisputable dominion overthe coastline of the Persian Gulf, a process which was a direct result of theextension of centralized power outwards from Tehran. With the incentive of