Each decade of the nineteenth century confirmed what had been apparent for at least a century, namely that years of misgovernment, economic stagnation, and military neglect had enfeebled the once-powerful and culturally sophisticated Persian and Ottoman empires. The Ottoman Empire lost its territories in north Africa and southeastern Europe, and escaped embarrassing and potentially fatal military defeats by Russia and its one-time province, Egypt, only because Great Britain and France dreaded the consequences of its disintegration and intervened on its behalf. Under the Qajar Dynasty, Persia lost territory on each side of the Caspian Sea to Russia and lands around the Persian Gulf to Great Britain. At times Russian and British consular officials in Teheran, not the shah and his officials, appeared to be in charge of Persian affairs.
What economic development occurred in the region mainly benefited European businessmen. Ottoman, Persian, and Egyptian governments all welcomed European investors and borrowed heavily form European financiers, who then “rescued” them from their unpayable debts in return for monopolies, control of governmental expenditures, and a cut of tax revenues. When in 1876 the Egyptian government failed to make required payments on its loans, two officials, one British and one French, took over its finances and became the real rulers of Egypt. They hired well-paid Europeans to administer the country and made debt liquidation the fiscal priority of the state. In 1882, following anti-European demonstrations and an attempted military revolt led by Colonel Ahmad Urabi, the British bombarded Alexandria, occupied Cairo, and established a protectorate over Egypt, making it for all intents and purposes a British colony until 1936.
Intellectuals, military men, and religious leaders throughout the region debated the causes and significance of these developments, and government officials, especially within the Ottoman state, took action by implementing reforms. Such reformers loosely fit into one of two categories. Moderates, or as they are sometimes called, “conservative modernizers,” sought to reorganize the army, end corruption, improve tax collection, and reform the judiciary while preserving the authority of traditional rulers. Reformers in this camp cautiously approved greater intellectual and cultural contacts with the West and accepted the need for European investment. By the 1870s, other more progressive reformers, such as the Young Ottomans, went beyond proposals for military and administrative reform; they sought greater acceptance of Western science and secularism and demanded parliaments, written constitutions, elections, and guarantees of individual freedoms.
Reformers in both camps faced formidable obstacles. Powerful families and well-paid officials who benefited from the status quo naturally opposed them. So did many religious leaders, who feared that all reforms at some level were European-inspired and thus inevitably would weaken Islam by encouraging secularization. True reform, they believed, would come not from modern weapons and new law codes, but from rededication to Islam. Many Islamic religious leaders thus supported the autocratic and reactionary rule of the Ottoman sultan Abbul Hamid II (1876-1909) and undercut the parliamentary regime established by the Persian Revolution of 1906 by demanding a legal system based on Islamic law rather than Western legal codes.
The reformers’ biggest obstacle was lack of money. The costs of modern armies, schools, roads, telegraph lines, bridges, and steamships outstripped revenues, forcing governments to rely on European loans and investments and to accept European control of taxes and expenditures. In other words, the reformers’ policies fostered greater economic dependency on the West, one of the things they most wished to avoid.
In the end, reformers and revolutionaries in the Middle East were unable to halt Western intervention or stage off political disaster. Egypt remained a British protectorate. In 1907 Persia was divided into a Russian north and British south, with only the central portion under the control of the Qatars, who were overthrown by a military coup in 1925. The Ottoman Empire lost all but a tiny sliver of its European territories as a result of the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 and lost its Arab provinces during World War I. It disappeared altogether when the sultan’s government was overthrown by Turkish nationalists in 1920 and replaced by the modern state of Turkey.
European imperialism did not always involve gunboats, invading armies, and control by colonial administrators. It frequently was more economic than political. Both the Ottoman Empire and Persia remained independent states in the 1800s, but their finances and economies were increasingly controlled and manipulated by European bondholders, bankers, businessmen, and speculators. Their experience is as much a part of the West’s imperialist expansion as that of India, Africa, and Southeast Asia.
For Persia, economic imperialism was epitomized by the numerous concessions granted to foreign businessmen by the shah’s government. These agreements gave Europeans control of a sector of the nation’s economy, usually in return for a one-time payment and an annual percentage of profits. Viewed as a painless way to attract foreign capital, solve budget problems, and generate bribes, such arrangements were irresistible to Persia’s shahs and their ministers. Hundreds of concessions were granted for activities ranging from railroad construction to the founding and administration of a national lottery. By far the most ambitious such agreements was the concession granted in 1872 to Baron Julius de Reuter, a British subject. De Reuter gained control of much of Persia’s economy – factories, minerals, irrigation works, agricultural improvements and virtually any other enterprise that had to do with Persia’s economic modernization – for a period of seventy years. The Russians and many Persians were outraged, and largely because of their opposition, government officials found reasons to withdraw the concession, although keeping the payments (legal and illegal) de Reuter had made.
Despite the outcry over the de Reuter concession, the number of concessions granted to Shah Nasir al-Din and his ministers mounted in the 1870s and 1880s. Many Persians experienced deep frustration over their inability to dissuade their autocratic and concession-loving ruler from selling off the nation’s economic future to foreigners. This changed, however, in 1891, when for the first and only time in history a government abandoned an unpopular policy after the adult population “kicked the habit” and gave up tobacco smoking.
In 1891 Persians learned of a new concession granted to the British Imperial Tobacco Corporation for the purchase, processing, and sale of tobacco, for which it paid the shah 15,000 pounds and promised him 25 percent of annual profits. The English expected to reap huge profits, but the Persians expected to pay inflated prices for a product they grew, used heavily, and previously had marketed themselves. Persia erupted with demonstrations, angry sermons, calls for boycotts, destruction of tobacco warehouses, and denunciations of the shah. Then in December Persia’s most prominent Shia religious leader, Hasan Shirazi, ordered Persians to give up tobacco smoking until the concession was lifted. The nation obeyed, and within only a few days the concession was canceled.
A key figure in the campaign against the tobacco concession was the Islamic intellectual Sayyid Jamal ad-Din “al Afghani,” who since 1889 had resided in Teheran. Born in 1838 or 1839 in Persia and raised as a Shia, he was educated in Persia, learned of the West while visiting British India and Europe, and traveled and taught throughout the Middle East. In his many writings and speeches Jamal ad-Din blended Islamic traditionalism and a selective acceptance of Western science, technology, and values. He taught that only a religious and intellectual revival that transcended state boundaries and sectarian differences could save Islam from subservience to the West.
From the time he moved to Teheran, Jamal ad-Din was a vocal critic of the shah. Fearing arrest, he sought sanctuary at a holy shrine, but the shah’s soldiers forcefully removed him in January 1891 and deported him to Ottoman territory. From exile, in April 1891 he wrote the following letter to Hasan Shirazi. It is unclear how much influence Jamal ad-Din’s letter had, but as Jamal ad-Din had hoped, Shirazi did abandon his apolitical stance by denouncing the shah and then issuing the antismoking decree.
The shah stayed in power and the foreigners remained, but for the first time in their modern history, all Persians, rural and urban, religious and secular, had united for a political end. Such unity of purpose reappeared in the Persian Revolution in 1906, which, for a time, established a parliamentary government for Persia.
Source: https://lps.org/manila/tbayne/SouthwestAsiaunderSiege.doc
Web site to visit: https://lps.org
Author of the text: indicated on the source document of the above text
If you are the author of the text above and you not agree to share your knowledge for teaching, research, scholarship (for fair use as indicated in the United States copyrigh low) please send us an e-mail and we will remove your text quickly. Fair use is a limitation and exception to the exclusive right granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work. In United States copyright law, fair use is a doctrine that permits limited use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders. Examples of fair use include commentary, search engines, criticism, news reporting, research, teaching, library archiving and scholarship. It provides for the legal, unlicensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author's work under a four-factor balancing test. (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use)
The information of medicine and health contained in the site are of a general nature and purpose which is purely informative and for this reason may not replace in any case, the council of a doctor or a qualified entity legally to the profession.
The texts are the property of their respective authors and we thank them for giving us the opportunity to share for free to students, teachers and users of the Web their texts will used only for illustrative educational and scientific purposes only.
All the information in our site are given for nonprofit educational purposes