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

10 Roxane Farmanfarmaiantough deals, which revealed the Persian government learning from itsmistakes and pushing the concessionary each time for higher returns and greaterPersian control, were hammered out despite collusion between European governmentand business representatives, a situation that reached its pinnacle ofabuse in the manipulation of the oil concession in the south by the Britishgovernment. Although detailed records of the Persian debates and decisionsconcerning the concessions have yet to come to light, a close reading of BritishForeign Office exchanges and Persian commentaries expose a perfidy on thepart of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, in association with the British Legationin Bushehr, the Embassy in Tehran and the banking authorities of the BritishcontrolledImperial Bank, that could not have been any less shameful anddestructive than any possible act of venality or incompetence on the partof the Qajars. The list of malfeasance has been amply recorded elsewhere,and extended to double-dealings in concessionary arrangements with theBakhtiari, 2 the halting of royalty payments for two years in contraventionof the concession’s terms, and the siphoning of thousands of barrels of unpaidforcrude oil to the British Admiralty at cost – actions against which, withinthe structure of the Great Game, Persia had few instruments with which tofight, and which cost her not only her financial security, but helped to confirmthe Qajar’s dismal reputation.CONTEMPORARY PARALLELS WITHTHE QAJAR PERIODThe lessons of history are not to be drawn from a search for repetition, butrather, from the way that defining characteristics of a place and people canaffect responses to events in similar ways across widely spaced periods oftime. For Persia under the Qajars, its geopolitical importance and its needto protect both its borders and its resources, reflected a continuum that definedPersian identity and Persian foreign policy, and which continues to do soeven under the country’s rubric as the Islamic Republic of Iran. For Iran,these two critical elements constitute Braudel’s “la longue durée”, that is, theslow-moving factors that persist throughout history, and affect the crises andchoices faced whenever an important juncture is reached.In the early period of the Qajar dynasty under Fath-Ali Shah, and beforehim, under the Safavids, Persia was the dominant state in the region, a geopoliticalhinge between all four sections: the divided Arab entities of the PersianGulf, a still embryonic British India, a militarily subdued Czarist Russia andan Ottoman empire more focused on European conquest than Asian expansion.This was a period that has its parallel in the situation enjoyed bymodern Iran in the latter decade of the twentieth century, a position of dominancegained primarily because of geopolitics, as the Soviet Union collapsedand withdrew not only physically from Afghanistan and the Central Asianstates, but financially from supporting Iraq and Syria. The events of 2001,