Family and faction in the great game in Asia: the struggle over the Persian mission, 1828–1835

Abstract

Throughout the nineteenth century, the Persian Mission reflected as a mirror the changing strategies devised by the British to safeguard British India from the unrest and crippling expense expected to follow from the unchecked expansion eastwards of Russia. Control of the mission was regularly seized by the foreign office and, whenever friendly relations with Russia seemed necessary to maintain the European balance of power, was as regularly sloughed off on the board of control and later the India office. If the status of the Persian Mission thus reflected the attempt of the British to postpone the choice between continental commitment and imperial defence of which they were so afraid, the mission's continued attachment to the foreign office after 1907 implied that the Anglo-Russian entente was not meant to reinforce the opponents of Germany in Europe. The willingness of Russia in 1907 to agree to terms she had hitherto refused, suggested that the problem of how to defend India against the repercussions expected to follow a military demonstration by Russia in central Asia, might have been solved by the terms of the revised Anglo-Japanese alliance.2 All plans for the defence of British India in the nineteenth century had to bring victory far away and cheaply. Most of them were made either by the Backward (or Punjab) School, led by Lord Lawrence and later Lord Wolseley or by the Forward (or Bombay) School, led by Lord Roberts. The blueprints had been handed down from two equally bitter rivals earlier in the century, dubbed the Bombay School and the Ludhiana School by H. W. C. Davis.3 The Punjab School followed the Ludhiana School by proposing to defend India at the Indus. This idea was most popular and most sensible between 1856 and 1874. The introduction of steam power to warships followed by the demilitarization of the Black Sea at the end of the Crimean War meant that a stationary defence along the North-West Frontier of India could be made more effective by a demonstration against Russia in the Black Sea. Later in the century, it was doubtful whether the British could force their way into the Black Sea over the opposition of the sultan and the tsar. Earlier, the British had been held back by the wind and the current in the Bosporus and the Dardanelles.4 The dependence of the Ludhiana and Punjab Schools on the ability of Great Britain to attack Russia all over the world, as Wolseley put it, was the argument used by both Bombay Schools to justify their alternative of an offensive strategy in central Asia. The Bombay Schools treated an offensive in central Asia as equivalent to