From trade to empire in the near east — III: the uses of the residency at Baghdad, 1794–1804

Abstract

A hazard of social life in the second British Empire was the predominance of Presbyterian Scots. Dour, energetic, and thrifty, encouraged and helped by Henry Dundas, president of the board of control, and his collaborator at East India House, David Scott, at the end of the eighteenth century they swarmed over India, each hoping to return to set up in society. To this day throughout white dominions one meets their scattered descendants, those who, although fortunate enough never to return home to some inhospitable or barren glen, parade in defiant and unrecognisable tartans an heritage never theirs. Such illusions must be cherished: the British Empire was their monument. Unfortunately, and uncomfortably for Sir Harford Jones, first resident of the East India Company at Baghdad, he happened to have been born in Wales. He had a second fault. Most Scots were Tories, and in a Tory age he was suspected of being a Whig.2 When Harold Nicolson criticised Lord Curzon as foreign secretary for being too Asiatic, he meant that Curzon, preferring not to intervene in Europe, and determined no other European state should intervene in Asia, refused to recognise Britain's most vital interest in providing security for France.3 Curzon was not alone in this. Most English ministers were more suspicious of France than Germany; had been so throughout the nineteenth century; and for good reason. Britain's greatness was achieved from fighting France, at the expense of her world power: its continuance depended on not choosing between European and Asiatic commitments. Grey had chosen. Curzon, at the end of a supposedly victorious war, could hardly have been asked to admit that the result of choosing had been failure. It had, of course; Britain's greatness depended upon there being a balance of power, not on being strong enough to maintain it. If Britain were to buttress France in Europe, there was no point to France. The British were in an acute dilemma: acting in defence of interests itself threatened them. In Asia their dilemma was more acute. In the nineteenth century power in the near east never had been balanced. As Castlereagh explained in his celebrated reply to the protocol of Troppau, the British react to changes in the foreign policy of states.4 Neither revolution nor rearmament is seen as threatening. This was true in the late nineteenth century of the German navy. Building it did not offend the British, until German policy during the Moroccan crisis appeared to imply, that Germany considered herself capable of overawing all the states of central and western Europe.5 This was also the implication of Napoleon's victories. There was an identical prerequisite; that Russia should be enticed or driven out of Europe, and Britain alarmed for the security of India. The hegemony of France or