Anyone who studied European history at school may still remember some of the “questions” making up 19th-century European diplomatic history. There is the “Italian Question,” partly solved after the unification of Italy in the 1860s, the “German Question,” partly solved by Bismarck, and, among the smaller questions that wracked the brains of European statesmen, the “Schleswig-Holstein Question” that had to do with the borders of Germany and Denmark.

This Question was memorably described by British foreign secretary Lord Palmerston, who claimed that “only three people have ever really understood the Schleswig-Holstein Question – the Prince Consort [husband of British monarch Queen Victoria], who is dead – a German professor, who has gone mad – and I, who have forgotten it.” Not all the questions were as difficult to understand as the Schleswig-Holstein Question, however, and in the end most of them came down to competition between the larger states and the European balance of power.

Perhaps even better known than the Schleswig-Holstein Question, important because it had to do with German expansionism, was the famous “Eastern Question” that concerned the fate of the Ottoman Empire. While the main lines of this are comparatively well known, their details, perhaps particularly in the first part of the 19th century, may be more obscure. British historian Jonathan Parry must therefore be saluted for his new book on the Eastern Question, Promised Lands, that looks at episodes in it from the beginning of the century to around 1850.

It does so entirely from a British perspective, meaning that readers can only imagine how the Question must have looked from the perspective of the other powers – or, indeed, from the various perspectives of the governments and peoples of the region.

At the beginning of the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire still controlled significant parts of Europe, including the Balkans and the whole of mainland Greece, but as the century wore on more and more Ottoman possessions were taken over by one or other of the European powers.

Russia had already taken previously Ottoman territories bordering the Black Sea, including the Crimea and parts of what is now Ukraine, in the 18th century, and Austria was competing with Russia to take over the Balkans. Greece claimed its independence from Ottoman rule in 1830 after a war of independence in which it received substantial help from the European powers. Egypt under its then ruler Mohamed Ali was only prevented from permanently taking Ottoman territories in the Levant and what is now Saudi Arabia by the Europeans, who intervened in order to prop up the failing Ottoman Empire.

The 19th-century Eastern Question thus came down to who would get what as a result of the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, and it rumbled on throughout the century, perhaps only being finally solved, in a fashion, with the collapse of the Empire in 1918, because of the fears and jealousies of the European powers.

Britain and France did not want to see Russia take over the Black Sea, feeling that this would threaten their interests in the Mediterranean and upset the balance of power. Austria did not want to see Russia take over the Balkans. France was suspicious of British intentions in the Eastern Mediterranean. Britain did not want to see France setting up client states in the same region. Protecting the route to India via the Red Sea or the Gulf was a significant complication.

The result was deadlock – the “Eastern Question” – with the Ottoman Empire, increasingly moribund, allowed to continue as a result of a failure to agree on its dismemberment. Meanwhile, periodic crises would break out as various parts broke off or revolted, leading to either the intervention of the European powers – usually to stop one another from benefitting – or an agreement not to intervene in order to preserve the status quo.

While the Eastern Question generally did not lead to armed conflict in the 19th century, at least not between the European powers, in the 1850s Britain and France fought the Crimean War against Russia to halt the latter’s putting pressure on the Ottoman Empire. While this preserved the Ottoman position in the Black Sea for another generation, it had important consequences for the European balance of power, excluding Russia, isolating Austria, and leaving both Austria and later France exposed to Prussian ambitions.

Such were some of the larger stakes and consequences of the Eastern Question, part of a more general policy based on fears for the status quo and of wanting to keep the Ottoman Empire alive during and after the period Parry covers.

EPISODES IN THE EAST: Parry starts early in the century with the emergence of the Question in its classical form during the Napoleonic Wars, during which French general Napoleon Bonaparte had demonstrated the military weakness of the Ottoman Empire by temporarily taking over Egypt, then an Ottoman province, and wreaking havoc across the Levant.

As so often in the Question’s later iterations, Napoleon’s real target was not the Ottoman Empire, but the European balance of power. Bolstering France’s position in the Eastern Mediterranean could be a useful way of attacking its main rival Britain as well as of bringing home to others who may have wished to challenge it the realities of French power.

The final defeat of France in 1815 saw the development of the European congress system that was meant to prevent the emergence of any similar maverick power. In the Eastern Mediterranean, while the Ottomans were made to swallow the loss of what is now Greece and parts of the Balkans, this immediately gave rise to concerns regarding Russian and other expansionism at the expense of a seriously weakened Ottoman Empire.

There was the question of Russian intentions in eastern Anatolia and what are now Iraq and Iran, since were the Russians to increase their influence in either this could damage British ambitions in the Gulf, along with the Red Sea a strategically important waterway on the route to India.

There was also the question of the growing strength of the Mohamed Ali regime in Egypt. In a war with the Ottomans beginning in the early 1830s, Mohamed Ali’s son Ibrahim had conquered the whole of the Levant, what are now Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon, and defeated the Ottomans in Anatolia, leaving the way open to Istanbul itself.

Should he have wished to do so, Ibrahim could also have moved eastwards towards Baghdad. At the same time, he had reinforced Egyptian rule over the Hijaz in what is now eastern Saudi Arabia and sent troops into the Najd in the west of the country, installing an Egyptian-backed ruler in Riyadh.

Parry says that “the possibility that Mohamed Ali might create a powerful Arab empire” to replace the increasing rickety Ottoman regime “was welcomed by some British commentators, who wanted to check the Russian threat to the Middle East.” But Palmerston, still the British foreign secretary, considered that “a strong pan-Arab empire” led from Egypt “would uproot the status quo in completely unpredictable ways, allowing Russia or France new chances to expand.”

Parry devotes three chapters of his book to the so-called “Eastern Crisis” of the late 1830s and early 1840s that eventually saw Britain move in coordination with the other European powers against the Mohamed Ali regime in Cairo, ending Egypt’s hopes of replacing the Ottoman Empire as the most important regional power.

While Palmerston eventually forced Egypt to withdraw from its conquests across the Middle East, Britain was at first unconcerned by Ibrahim’s campaigns in the Levant, even underwriting them by an agreement signed in 1833, Parry says. What led to the change in the British position was not any particular hostility to Mohamed Ali or his regime, he adds. Instead, it was once again the fear that the new situation in the Middle East could threaten British interests by allowing new scope for the Russians or the French to upset the balance of power.

 

Quoting from British government archives, Parry says that Palmerston told his colleagues that the choice was either to defend Ottoman sovereignty against the threats to it from Egypt or elsewhere or accept “the practical division of the Turkish Empire into two separate and independent states, whereof one will be the dependency of France and the other a satellite of Russia and in both of which our political influence will be annulled and our commercial interests will be sacrificed.”

A deal was made by the Convention of London in 1840 under which Mohamed Ali was obliged to withdraw from the Levant in return for recognition of his family’s dynastic rights in Egypt. Russia was brought on board by a deal on the Black Sea. While France at first held out in support of Mohamed Ali, the threat that the latter represented to the Ottoman Empire “encouraged all the other powers, and British public opinion, to unite against it, summoning all the images that had been used against Napoleon in 1799,” Parry says.

At the end of his long and immensely scholarly book taking in many episodes in the early 19th-century Eastern Question, Parry says that for Britain everything flowed from “the protection of the lands and waterways of the Middle East from rivals,” explaining its policy of shoring up the Ottoman Empire insofar as that was still possible while at the same time trying to reach agreements with local rulers, among them Egypt’s Mohamed Ali, and the other European powers.

“Very quickly after 1798, most local British officials formed the view that the Ottoman authorities were incapable of providing good government” in any of the Empire’s territories, but a possible substitute, such as Mohamed Ali’s Egypt in the 1830s, would have brought its own problems with it, providing “the means for France or Russia to buy its way into the region by bribing the Egyptian viceroy.”

Direct British rule of parts of the Middle East was not on the cards during the first part of the century, Parry says, not because Ottoman collapse was unexpected, but rather because of the additional problems it would bring. “The peculiarity of the ‘Eastern Question’ was that the full concert [of Europe] had to be involved,” he says, “because Britain, France, Austria, and Russia all had vital interests in the future of the Ottoman Empire.”

Under those circumstances, it was better for Britain to continue with its policies of indirect rule by extending commercial and political influence rather than seek to challenge the other powers directly. Even when Britain invaded Egypt in 1882, Parry says, it pretended to be doing so “in pursuit of order” as it had earlier done when it had interfered in the country “in 1801, 1807, 1833, 1841, and 1851,” either militarily or through intense diplomatic pressure.

“In the years before 1854,” Parry’s terminus in Promised Lands, “Britain’s territorial and strategic ambitions in the region grew, but remained limited,” he says. When its commitments later ballooned as a result of “what it saw as French, Russian, or German imperial ambitions… its response took on a life of its own, driven partly by short-termist, pre-emptive anxieties, and partly by longer term hopes for improvement, which were often unrealistic or self-deceiving.”

 

Jonathan Parry, Promised Lands. The British and the Ottoman Middle East, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2022, pp453.

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*A version of this article appears in print in the 18 August, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.