From trade to empire in the near East – I: the end of the spectre of the overland trade, 1775–1801

Abstract

During the nineteenth century, to be admired by the British, foreigners needed to be warlike or dead. The dead were preferred, particularly classical Greeks, but the Arabs were their closest competitor. The attraction of Arabia was emptiness. Nothing was there, or nothing the British recognised: they remembered Alexander and Antony. According to the viceroy of India, as late as 1871 British policy in Arabia 'originated in a geographical error'.2 Since the Napoleonic wars the British had learned little. They had learned enough. The Arabs' oil being useful and their quarrels raucous, disguises how small, until the First World War, were the economic interests of the great powers in Arabia; their policies reflected their interests elsewhere. As Palmerston had predicted,3 digging the Suez Canal was a mistake, characterising what was sensibly seen as desert. Visualised by the British at the end of the eighteenth century, this desert had two edges. One side, as far as Constantinople, Smyrna, and Aleppo, was allotted to the Levant Company; the other, beyond Basra, Muscat, and Jeddah, to the East India Company. Unfortunately for the British, in 1798 Bonaparte invading Egypt stepped between. The dangers from such an invasion were well understood. The British had debated the advantages and disadvantages of a connection with Egypt for twenty-five years. Prominent in the debate, twice the British agent in Egypt, and famous as an advocate of the overland trade, was George Baldwin. Maps of the Indian Ocean current in 1800 appear misleadingly accurate. Africa appeared much as today. Certain areas, however, were but slightly surveyed; the east coast of Africa, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea.4 'I do not think', said a British naval officer of the Red Sea, 'there is any place of large extent so little surveyed or known.' Twenty-five years earlier, Warren Hastings, the Governor-General of India, had suggested asking the Egyptians to pilot British ships to Suez, until the British could produce an accurate chart. The suggestion had no result, because Hastings' proposal to develop the overland trade was vigorously opposed by the Turks. It was equally vigorously supported by Baldwin.