Approaches to the great game in Asia

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The behaviour of Englishmen in the Middle East in the nineteenth century resembled a formation dance more complicated than the Circassian Circle. As Lord Curzon would explain it, the British walked round and round, regularly returning to their starting point having done nothing on the way.' The best example of this was given by Curzon himself. At the end of the First World War, he and Lord Hardinge, another former viceroy of India, who had gone back to his previous job of permanent under-secretary for foreign affairs, tried to answer a question the British had been asking since 1798. Their choice of Batum as the forward base from which sea power could protect India cheaply and far away, made it the last in a series of proposed bases that had begun with the selection of the islands of Perim in the straits of Bab el-Mandab and Kharg in the Persian Gulf during the war of the Second Coalition.2 In the interval, the British selection had ranged from Cyprus and Alexandretta in the eastern Mediterranean to Bukkur on the Indus. All of the possible choices turned out to be unsuitable for the same reason: they entangled Great Britain in local affairs in the Middle East, instead of permitting the British to decide when and in what way they would intervene. The degree of Curzon's interest in the Middle East partly explains the failure of his career. Or so Hardinge may have concluded, whose own reputation was irreversibly tarnished by the defeat of the Indian Army in Mesopotamia.3 To North Americans, mesmerized by the oil bubbling beneath quarrelling Arabs, Persians, and Israelis, the Middle East is today an area of great interest. Few men who mattered in nineteenth century Great Britain found it of interest, and most of those who did, knew what it ought, if possible, to be ignored. The Straits, which forced themselves upon the attention of the British during the Ochakov Crisis in 1791, were to prove as great a nuisance as the consequences, foretold by Lord Palmerston, of digging a Suez Canal. One strengthened Russia, the other France and, later on, Italy.4 By the end of the eighteenth century, British trade with the Middle East had vanished; the overland post had been started. Most Englishmen apparently interested in the area were merely trying to prevent the partition of Middle Eastern states, lest this should destroy either the European balance of power or the stability of British India. European attempts to assess the likely effects of the partition of Turkey on the balance of power are known as the Eastern Question: the attempts made by the British in the Middle East to isolate India from European politics are known as the Great Game in Asia. For Great Britain, being both a European and an Asiatic state, the two were indistinguishable. These two characteristics of the British in the Middle East point one towards the traps into which historians of British diplomatic and imperial history often fall: choosing the