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

78 Stephanie Croninaccounting device – deductions in the revenues they owed. By contrast, themaintenance of vast numbers of regular troops, most of whom had little orno real existence but the cost of whom was always met in full, the pay offoreign officers themselves and the purchase of weapons from abroad,amounted to a crippling expense. It was indeed an expense which increasedthroughout the century as ever more regiments were raised, each with largenumbers of salaried but otherwise inactive Iranian officers. Ever more foreignmissions arrived, even though Iran’s financial position deteriorated asit became integrated into the global economy. Rather than the nezam regimentsdragging Iran towards a wider modernization, the regiments themselvesbecame assimilated to the decaying Qajar order, the conditions of officersand men, far from being maintained at the level prescribed by Abbas Mirzaat the time of the Napoleonic wars, worsening as the century progressed. Bythe end of the nineteenth century Iran’s military forces were much weakervis-à-vis European armies than they had been in the time of Abbas Mirza.Yet there is another dimension to the history of Qajar military reform.Two foreign missions, although very different in character and context, weresuccessful in producing military forces which were to have a defining impacton Iran’s history in the twentieth century, the Government Gendarmerie andthe Cossack Division. Both forces carved out an existence in isolation fromany wider attempt at modernization. Both were financed without any radicalrestructuring of domestic taxation, the bulk of their cost borne by oneor other foreign power, both were armed by the largesse of Britain and Russia,both sidestepped any use of the unwieldy and inefficient bunichah system ofrecruitment, remaining small and enlisting mostly volunteers and bothrelied on diplomatic support to face down their domestic critics and enemies.The Gendarmerie constituted the most successful in the Qajar period’sattempts to build a modern army with the help of foreign officers. In the1920s the Gendarmerie provided Reza Khan with a human resource, themilitary expertize and experience of the Gendarme officer corps, vital to theconstruction of the new army. The Cossack officers for their part providedhim with a bedrock of political loyalty on which he secured not just the newarmy but also his dynasty. Crucially, however, although the officer corps ofboth forces were incubated by foreign missions, it was only after the marginalizationor removal of these missions that the Gendarmes and Cossackswere freed to assume a national political role.There was in fact a fundamental conflict at the heart of the relationshipbetween Iran and the foreign military missions. All the various Iranian individualsand groups who embraced the concept of military-led modernization,first the shahs and their reforming ministers, then constitutionalist andnationalist political circles, hoped to build an army on the European modelin order to defend Iran against Europe. This was not an objective that wasshared by any of the foreign military missions, with the partial exception ofthe Swedish mission established under constitutionalist auspices. The majorimperial powers, especially Britain, Russia and France, engaged in the game