The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

by Frankopan, Peter

  Although there was little sign of a breakthrough on the western front, with both sides suffering extraordinarily heavy losses and with years of bloodshed still in prospect, the Allies were already sitting down to carve up the lands and interests of their rivals. There is no little irony in this considering the charges of imperialism that were laid against Germany and its partners after the armistice. Just months after the war had started, the Allies were already thinking of feasting on the carcasses of their defeated enemies.

  In this sense, there was more at stake than dangling the carrots of Constantinople and the Dardanelles before the Russians, for at the start of 1915 a commission under the chairmanship of Sir Maurice de Bunsen was set up to report on proposals for the future of the Ottoman Empire after victory had been assured. Part of the trick was dividing things up in a way that suited those who were allies at present but rivals in the past, and potentially in the future too. Nothing should be done, wrote Sir Edward Grey, to arouse suspicions that Britain had designs on Syria. ‘It would mean a break with France’, he wrote, ‘if we put forward any claims in Syria and Lebanon’ – a region that had seen substantial investment by French businesses in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.52

  In order, therefore, to show solidarity with Russia and to avoid confrontation with France over its sphere of influence in Syria, it was decided to land a large force made up of troops from Britain, Australia and New Zealand not, as had originally been planned, at Alexandretta (now in south-eastern Turkey) but on the Gallipoli peninsula at the mouth of the Dardanelles Straits that guarded access to Constantinople.53 It was a landing site that proved to be singularly ill suited to hosting a major offensive, and a death trap for many of those who tried to fight their way on to land, uphill against well-fortified Turkish positions. The disastrous campaign that followed had at its origins the struggle to establish control over the communication and trade networks linking Europe with the Near East and Asia.54

  The future of Constantinople and the Dardanelles had been set out; now that of the Middle East needed to be resolved. In a series of meetings in the second half of 1915 and at the start of 1916, Sir Mark Sykes, an over-confident MP who had the ear of Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, and François Georges-Picot, an uppity French diplomat, divvied up the region. A line was agreed by the two men, which stretched from Acre (in the far north of what is now Israel) north-eastwards as far as the frontier with Persia. The French would be left to their own devices in Syria and Lebanon, the British to theirs – in Mesopotamia, Palestine and Suez.

  Dividing up the spoils in this way was dangerous, not least since conflicting messages about the future of the region were being transmitted elsewhere. There was usayn, who was still being offered independence for the Arabs and the restitution of a caliphate, with him at the head; there were the peoples of ‘Arabia, Armenia, Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine’, who the British Prime Minister was busy stating publicly should be ‘entitled to a recognition of their separate national conditions’, seemingly a promise of sovereignty and independence.55 Then there was the United States, which had received repeated assurances from the British and French that they were fighting ‘not for selfish interests but, above all, to safeguard the independence of peoples, right and humanity’. Both Britain and France passionately claimed to have noble aims at heart and were striving to set free ‘the populations subject to the bloody tyranny of the Turks’, according to The Times of London.56 ‘It was all bad,’ wrote Edward House, President Wilson’s foreign policy adviser, when he found out about the secret agreement from the British Foreign Secretary. The French and the British ‘are making [the Middle East] a breeding place for future war’.57 He was not wrong about that.

  At the root of the problem was that Britain knew what was at stake thanks to the natural resources that had been found in Persia, and which Mesopotamia also seemed likely to possess. Indeed, a concession for the oil of the latter was approved (though not formally ratified) on the day of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination in 1914. It was given to a consortium led by the Turkish Petroleum Company, in which Anglo-Persian was the majority shareholder, with minority stakes given to Royal Dutch/Shell and Deutsche Bank and a sliver to Calouste Gulbenkian, the deal-maker extraordinaire who had put the agreement together.58 Whatever was being promised or committed to the peoples and nations of the Middle East, the truth was that behind the scenes the shape and the future of the region was being dreamed up by officials, politicians and businessmen who had one thing in mind: securing control over oil and the pipelines that would pump it to ports to be loaded on to tankers.

  The Germans realised what was going on. In a briefing paper that found its way into British hands, it was contended that Britain had two overriding strategic goals. First was to retain control of the Suez canal, because of its unique strategic and commercial value; second was to hold on to the oilfields in Persia and the Middle East.59 This was a shrewd assessment. Britain’s sprawling trans-continental empire covered nearly a quarter of the globe. Despite the many different climates, ecosystems and resources it encompassed, there was one obvious lack: oil.

  With no meaningful deposits to speak of in any of its territories, the war offered Britain the chance to put that right. ‘The only big potential supply’, wrote Sir Maurice Hankey, bookish Secretary to the War Cabinet, ‘is the Persian and Mesopotamian supply.’ As a result, establishing ‘control of these oil supplies becomes a first-class war aim’.60 There was nothing to be gained in this region from a military perspective, Hankey stressed when he wrote to the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, the same day; but Britain should act decisively if it was ‘to secure the valuable oil wells’ in Mesopotamia.61

  Few needed convincing. Before the war ended, the British Foreign Secretary was talking in uncompromising terms about how the future looked to him. There were doubtless questions ahead concerning the dismemberment of their rivals’ empires. ‘I do not care’, he told senior figures, ‘under what system we keep the oil, whether it is by perpetual lease or whatever it may be, but I am quite clear it is all-important for us that this oil should be available.’62

  There were good reasons for such determination – and for the anxieties that underpinned it. At the start of 1915, the Admiralty had been consuming 80,000 tons of oil per month. Two years later, as a result of the larger number of ships in service and the proliferation of oil-burning engines, the amount had more than doubled to 190,000 tons. The needs of the army had spiralled up even more dramatically, as the fleet of 100 vehicles in use in 1914 swelled to tens of thousands. By 1916, the strain had all but exhausted Britain’s oil reserves: stocks of petrol that stood at 36 million gallons on 1 January plummeted to 19 million gallons six months later, falling to 12.5 million just four weeks after that.63 When a government committee looked into likely requirements for the coming twelve months, it found that estimates indicated that there would be barely half the amount available to satisfy likely demand.64

  Although the introduction of petrol rationing with immediate effect did something to stabilise stock levels, continued concerns about problems of supply led to the First Sea Lord ordering Royal Navy vessels to spend as much time in harbour as possible in the spring of 1917, while cruising speed was limited to twenty knots when out at sea. The precariousness of the situation was underlined by projections prepared in June 1917 that by the end of the year the Admiralty would have no more than six weeks’ supplies in reserve.65

  This was all made worse by Germany’s development of effective submarine warfare. Britain had been importing oil in large quantities from the United States (and at increasingly high prices), but many of the tankers did not make it through. The Germans had managed to sink ‘so many fuel oil ships’, wrote Walter Page, the US ambassador to London, in 1917, that ‘this country may very soon be in a perilous condition’.66 A revolution in technology that enabled engines to run more quickly and more effectively had accompanied the rapid mechanisation of warfare after 1914. Both wer
e driven by the ferocious land-war in Europe. But in turn the rise in consumption meant that the question of access to oil, which had already been a serious concern before the outbreak of hostilities, became a major – if not the decisive – factor in British international policy.

  Some British policymakers had high hopes of what lay ahead. One experienced administrator, Percy Cox, who had served in eastern Persia and knew the country well, suggested in 1917 that Britain had the chance to gain such a tight grip on the Persian Gulf that the Russians, the French, the Japanese, the Germans and the Turks could be excluded permanently.67 As a result, although the collapse of Russia into revolution in 1917 and the peace settlement with Germany soon after the Bolshevik seizure of power was worrying as far as the war in Europe was concerned, it brought a silver lining elsewhere. Under autocratic rule, Lord Balfour told the Prime Minister in the summer of 1918, Russia had been ‘a danger to her neighbours; and to none of her neighbours so much as ourselves’.68 Its implosion was good news for Britain’s position in the east. There arose a real opportunity to cement control over the whole region that stretched between Suez and India, thereby securing both.

  18

  The Road to Compromise

  In Persia, the British were intent on installing a reliable strongman who would serve their interests well. A senior figure at the court soon caught their eye: Prince Farman-Farma was known to hold extensive investments on the London stock exchange and his considerable fortune was therefore closely linked to the continued success of the British Empire. Intensive lobbying was undertaken to get him appointed Prime Minister, with the British representative in Teheran having an audience with the Shah on Christmas Eve in 1915 to make clear how favourably Farman-Farma’s appointment would be viewed in London. ‘A change of Prime Minister was inevitable in the near future,’ the Shah was told, especially given all the ‘hostile elements’ in the government in Teheran. The Shah was easily convinced: ‘he quite agreed and urged that it should be done at once. He promised to urge FF to accept office immediately.’1 Farman-Farma was duly appointed a few days later.

  In Mesopotamia, the lack of a local figurehead to collaborate with made things more difficult. The British had taken matters into their own hands, sending troops from Basra to occupy Baghdad in the spring of 1917. Little thought was given to what would happen next, as Lord (formerly Sir Charles) Hardinge wrote from London to Gertrude Bell, the brilliant, mercurial scholar and traveller who knew this region as well as anyone. ‘It really would not matter’, he suggested, ‘if we choose three of the fattest men from Baghdad or three of the men with the longest beards who would be put up as the emblems of Arab rule.’ The British just needed any leader on whom they could effectively impress the benefits of co-operation with the occupying force; naturally, this would involve bribing them handsomely.2

  There were, however, other serious problems to face – more significant than teasing out the future political set-up of this region. Leading voices in Britain were already advocating the revision of the Sykes–Picot agreement, even as the ink was drying. This was caused not by any qualms about the overt imperialism of the secret deal, but rather by a report prepared by Admiral Slade, previously director of the intelligence division at the Admiralty, who had been responsible for assessing the Persian oilfields in 1913 and had shortly afterwards been appointed a director of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. Slade stressed that ‘under no possible circumstances can we be disturbed in our enjoyment’ of the Persian oilfields, and that that was true of other parts of the region too. There were indications, he added, of the presence of significant quantities of oil in ‘Mesopotamia, Koweit, Bahrein and in Arabia’. He strongly recommended that the lines be redrawn to ensure that as much as possible of these territories fell within the British-controlled zone. ‘It is important to secure control of all the oil rights in these areas so that no other Power can exploit them for their [own] benefit.’3 The Foreign Office watched nervously, gathering articles in European newspapers that demanded Germany’s ‘indispensable requirement of the freedom of the sea in Persian Gulf’ as an indication that the sooner Britain secured its position, the better.4

  By the end of 1918, just weeks after the end of the war, Britain managed to get what it wanted: the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, convinced President Clemenceau of France to amend the agreement and cede control of Mosul and the surrounding area. This was done partly by playing on the fear that Britain might stand in the way of France establishing a protectorate over Syria, but also by hinting that British support on the issue of Alsace-Lorraine in the settlement negotiations which were due to begin shortly was by no means certain. ‘What do you want?’ Clemenceau asked Lloyd George bluntly in London. ‘I want Mosul,’ the British Prime Minister replied. ‘You shall have it. Anything else?’ ‘Yes,’ came the reply, ‘I want Jerusalem too.’ The reply was the same: ‘You shall have it.’ Clemenceau was ‘right as a die and never went back on his word’, recalled one senior civil servant who had the ear of Lloyd George.5

  The British had also identified Palestine as a target owing to its location as a buffer against any threat to the Suez canal, which served as one of the empire’s most vital arteries and over which control had been established in 1888. Just as British troops had moved on Baghdad, therefore, so they advanced on Palestine from the south and, improbably, from the east with T. E. Lawrence emerging from the desert to take Aqaba in the summer of 1917. A few months later, Jerusalem fell too, despite fierce counter-attacks from the Ottoman Seventh and Eighth Armies, led by General Erich von Falkenhayn, who had served as Chief of the General Staff of the German army earlier in the war. The British General Edmund Allenby entered the city on foot as a mark of respect, having captured the city in what the British Prime Minister called ‘a Christmas present for the British people’.6

  Palestine was important for another reason. Concerns had been growing about the rising levels of Jewish immigration to Britain, with the numbers arriving from Russia alone rising by a factor of five between 1880 and 1920. At the turn of the twentieth century, there had been discussions about offering land in East Africa to encourage Jewish émigrés to settle there, but by the time of the war attention had shifted to Palestine. In 1917, a letter from the Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, to Lord Rothschild was leaked to The Times that spoke of ‘His Majesty’s Government [viewing] with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’.7 Known as the Balfour Declaration, the idea of designating territories for Jews to settle was what Balfour later described to the House of Lords as ‘a partial solution to the great and abiding Jewish problem’.8

  Although the championing of a homeland for European Jews has understandably attracted attention, Britain also had its eye on Palestine for its position in relation to the oilfields and as a terminus for a pipeline linking to the Mediterranean. This would save a journey of a thousand miles, planners later noted, and would give Britain ‘virtual control over the output of what may well prove to be one of the richest oil fields in the world’.9 It was imperative, therefore, that Britain had a strong presence in Palestine, that it had control over Haifa, with its good, deep harbour, which made it the ideal place for loading oil on to British tankers, and that the pipeline ran to this port – rather than to the north, and French-controlled Syria.

  As Britain’s strategic thinking went at the time, Haifa would provide a perfect terminus for oil piped from Mesopotamia. So it proved. By 1940, more than 4 million tons of oil was flowing along the pipeline that was built after the war, enough to supply the entire Mediterranean fleet. It was, as Time magazine called it, the ‘carotid artery of the British empire’.10 The world’s largest empire was receiving massive transfusions of the black blood of oil, pumped directly from the heart of the world.

  By the start of 1918, then, thoughts had long since turned to the shape of the post-war world and how the spoils of victory would be divided. The problem was that there was a difference between deals struck among clu
bbable politicians, testy diplomats and planners armed with maps and pencils in European capital cities, and the reality on the ground. It was all very well planning for a carve-up of territories where the interests of Britain and France would be expanded and protected, but things became rather more complicated when practicalities intruded.

  For example, in the summer of 1918, the British General Lionel Dunsterville was ordered to advance from north-western Persia to the Caspian, while other senior officers were sent to monitor the Caucasus, with the aim of ensuring that the Turks did not seize control of the oilfields of Azerbaijan, take the region south of the Caspian or gain control of the Trans-Caspian Railway that led to the Afghan border. This was classic overstretch, an all but impossible mission – and one that sure enough ended in disaster. Advancing Turkish forces surrounded Baku, trapping Dunsterville inside for six weeks before allowing him to withdraw. Horrific scenes of bloodshed then followed as locals settled scores after the city had surrendered.11

  Panic enveloped officials in the India Office in London, who frantically sought authorisation to send agents into Central Asia to keep track of what was going on there in the wake of Turkish resurgence and turmoil in Russia, where rioting and demonstrations in the Samarkand district, the Fergana valley and Tashkent played a role in revolution breaking out across the whole empire.12 ‘All effective control over native population of Turkestan has been removed,’ wrote the Secretary of State to the viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, at the start of 1918, ‘owing to the collapse of central government in Russia and complete breakdown in discipline in the Russian army.’13

  In response to warnings that anti-British sentiments among the Muslim population of the region were running high, envoys were dispatched to monitor the situation and oversee the spread of anglophile propaganda. Officers were sent to Kashgar and Meshed to assess the mood, while there were tortuous discussions about whether to send armed forces into Afghanistan and Tashkent, or to approve more grandiose schemes such as encouraging the Emir of Afghanistan to expand westwards and occupy the Murghab valley as far as Merv.14 New ideas, new identities and new aspirations were springing up across Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia after the Russian Revolution, as demands for self-expression if not self-determination grew louder and louder.