Main From the First World War to the Arab Spring: What's Really Going On in the Middle East?
From the First World War to the Arab Spring: What's Really Going On in the Middle East?
M. E. McMillan (auth.)
Starting from the events surrounding the First World War, the author traces the history of the modern Middle East and puts the Arab Spring into context. McMillan breaks down the nuances of Western involvement in the Middle East, alliances and divisions between Middle Eastern peoples and nations, and the role of religion in these conflicts.
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US
Series: Middle East Today
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I WOULD LIKE TO READ IT AND KNOW MUCH ABOUT THE BOOK
31 December 2017 (06:54)
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M. E. McMILLAN
WHAT'S REALLY GOING ON
IN THE MIDDLE EAST?
Praise for From the First World War to the Arab Spring:
What's Really Going On in the Middle East?
"The significance of this book lies in its contextualization of the Arab Spring
uprisings and the legacies of the First World War, as well as in its analysis of how
these large-scale ruptures have shaken the modern Middle Eastern state system
to its foundation."
—Fawaz A. Gerges, Emirates Chair of Contemporary Middle Eastern
Studies, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK, and
author of Contentious Politics in the Middle East
"M. E. McMillan successfully throws light on why the disasters that engulf the
Middle East grow worse by the day. She does this in a series of brief, stimulating
essays that challenge the reader to think hard about the topics she discusses. She
clearly cares deeply about the area's problems, and those reading the book will be
enlightened and will finish up sharing her cares. Well worth a close read!"
—Alan Jones, Emeritus Professor of Classical Arabic,
"Sweeping in scope and meticulous in coverage, From the First World War to
the Arab Spring: What's Really Going On in the Middle East? is essential reading for anyone seeking an in-depth understanding of the historical evolution of
the modern Middle East. Wonderfully written, M. E. McMillan captures the full
magnitude of the social, political, and economic forces that have transformed
the Arab world and redefined its position within the global order. McMillan has
produced a work of exceptional lucidity that scholars, students, and policymakers alike will consult for years to come."
—Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, Fellow of the Middle East, Baker
Institute at Rice University, USA, and author of The Gulf
States in International Political Economy
"M. E. McMillan's timely book From the First World War to the Arab Spring:
What's Really Going On in the Middle East? judiciously puts the current creative
crisis in the region in a necessary historical context, pulling us back to the inaugural year of 1914 when the continued legacy of European imperialism was yielding to the rising global American power and the transition framing the eventual
formation of postcolonial nation-states that seem to be crumbling right in front
of our eyes today. More critical and informed studies like McMillan's are much
needed if the cascade of the daily news is not to dull the edge of our critical thinking ahead in an increasingly tumultuous and yet ultimately liberating historical
—Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian
Studies and Comparative Literature, Columbia University,
USA, and author of Being a Muslim in the World
"To begin understanding why the Middle East is falling apart today, read
M. E. McMillan's beautifully written and admirably succinct book From the First
World War to the Arab Spring: What's Really Going On in the Middle East? She
unravels with verve the clash of empires that preceded the violent dismantling
of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. But most importantly, she analyzes with clarity the contradictory principles and conflicting interests that were
embedded in the new Middle East. Not only were borders drawn haphazardly at
war's end, but also the Great Powers insisted that Middle Eastern peoples take on
new identities. Enlightenment concepts such as nationalism, constitutionalism,
and separation of church and state were imposed at the point of a gun. Today, that
order is in shambles, despite—or perhaps because of—multiple interventions.
McMillan is a wonderful guide. I will be assigning it to my students."
—Joshua Landis, Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies
and Associate Professor at the College of International Relations,
University of Oklahoma, USA
"A lively and engaging book that sheds great clarity on a century of Middle
Eastern conflict."
—Eugene Rogan, Associate Professor of the Modern History of the Middle
East and Director of the Middle East Centre, St Antony's College,
University of Oxford, UK, and author of The Arabs: A History
and The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East
Middle East Today
Seriese ditors:
Fawaz A. Gerges
Professor of International Relations
Emirates Chair of the Modern Middle East
Nader Hashemi
Director, Center for Middle East Studies
Associate Professor of Middle East and Islamic Politics
Josef Korbel School of International Studies
The Iranian Revolution of 1979, the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War, and the US
invasion and occupation of Iraq have dramatically altered the geopolitical landscape of the contemporary Middle East. The Arab Spring uprisings have complicated this picture. This series puts forward a critical body of first-rate scholarship
that reflects the current political and social realities of the region, focusing on
original research about contentious politics and social movements; political
institutions; the role played by nongovernmental organizations such as Hamas,
Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood; and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Other themes of interest include Iran and Turkey as emerging preeminent powers in the region, the former an "Islamic Republic" and the latter an emerging
democracy currently governed by a party with Islamic roots; the Gulf monarchies, their petrol economies and regional ambitions; potential problems of
nuclear proliferation in the region; and the challenges confronting the United
States, Europe, and the United Nations in the greater Middle East. The focus of
the series is on general topics such as social turmoil, war and revolution, international relations, occupation, radicalism, democracy, human rights, and Islam as
a political force in the context of the modern Middle East.
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Kingshuk Chatterjee
Religion and the State in Turkish Universities: The Headscarf Ban
Fatma Nevra Seggie
Turkish Foreign Policy: Islam, Nationalism, and Globalization
Hasan Kösebalaban
Nonviolent Resistance in the Second Intifada: Activism and Advocacy
Edited by Maia Carter Hallward and Julie M. Norman
The Constitutional System of Turkey: 1876 to the Present
Ergun Özbudun
Islam, the State, and Political Authority: Medieval Issues and Modern Concerns
Edited by Asma Afsaruddin
Bahrain from the Twentieth Century to the Arab Spring
Miriam Joyce
Palestinian Activism in Israel: A Bedouin Woman Leader in a Changing Middle East
Henriette Dahan-Kalev and Emilie Le Febvre with Amal El'Sana-Alh'jooj
Egypt Awakening in the Early Twentieth Century: Mayy Ziyadah's Intellectual Circles
Boutheina Khaldi
The Social and Economic Origins of Monarchy in Jordan
Tariq Moraiwed Tell
Palestinians in the Israeli Labor Market: A Multi-disciplinary Approach
Edited by Nabil Khattab and Sami Miaari
State, Religion, and Revolution in Iran, 1796 to the Present
Behrooz Moazami
Political Islam in the Age of Democratization
Kamran Bokhari and Farid Senzai
The Role of Ideology in Syrian-US Relations: Conflict and Cooperation
J. K. Gani
"Dual Containment" Policy in the Persian Gulf: The USA, Iran, and Iraq, 1991–2000
Alex Edwards
Hezbollah, Islamist Politics, and International Society
Filippo Dionigi
Sold Out? US Foreign Policy, Iraq, the Kurds, and the Cold War
Bryan R. Gibson
Jimmy Carter and the Middle East: The Politics of Presidential Diplomacy
Daniel Strieff
Contentious Politics in the Middle East: Popular Resistance and Marginalized
Activism beyond the Arab Uprisings
Edited by Fawaz A. Gerges
From the First World War to the Arab Spring: What's Really Going On in the
Middle East?
From the First World War
to the Arab Spring
FROM THE FIRST WORLD WAR TO THE ARAB SPRING
Copyright © M. E. McMillan 2016
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2016 978-1-137-522-1-6
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
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Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
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First published 2016 by
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work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers
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McMillan, M. E., author.
From the First World War to the Arab Spring : what's really going on
in the Middle East? / M.E. McMillan.
pages cm.—(Middle East today)
1. Middle East—History—20th century. 2. Middle East—History—
21st century. 3. Middle East—Politics and government—20th century.
4. Middle East—Politics and government—21st century. 5. Political
culture—Middle East. I. Title.
DS62.8.M46 2015
956.04—dc23
A catalogue record for the book is available from the British Library.
For my late grandfather William (Bill) Milford
And for my great friend Rosie Cleary
Note on Conventions
Lost in the Labyrinth: What's Really Going
On in the Middle East?
Part I The Tangled Web: Why the Great Powers
of Europe Became Involved in the Middle East
Sarajevo: Sunday, June 28, 1914
The British Empire and the Arab World: Ambition, Austerity,
and a Class Apart
The French Empire and the Arab World: From the
Crusades to the Civilizing Mission
The Russian Empire and the Arab World: Religion,
Royalty, and the New Rome
The German Empire and the Arab World: Family Feuds
and Eastern Ambitions
The Ottoman Empire: How the Arab World Was
Won and Lost
Too Many Straight Lines on the Map: Where,
When, and Why It Started to Go Wrong
London: Tuesday, December 21, 1915
The Arab World before the War: The Facts on the Ground
The Remaking of the Middle East: Enter the Nation-State
10 From Sykes-Picot to the Treaty of Sèvres: Betrayals,
Backstabbing, and Broken Promises
11 The Poisoned Legacy and the War's Unanswered Questions
All or Nothing: Why All Roads
Lead to Jerusalem
12 Where to Begin?
13 Jerusalem: The Temple Mount
14 Jerusalem: The Noble Sanctuary
Part IV Kings, Colonels, and Coups: Why There
Is a Democratic Deficit in the Arab World
15 Cairo: Wednesday, July 23, 1952
16 The Kings, the Colonels, and the Political Time Warp:
The Return of the Middle Ages
17 I Am the State: Power, Politics, and the Cult of Personality
18 The Problem of Absolute Power: From Stability to Stagnation
The Sacred Versus the Secular:
Who Speaks for Islam?
19 Mecca: Tuesday, November 20, 1979
20 1979: The View from Tehran
21 1979: Holy War and Unholy Alliances
22 The Arab Spring and the Democratic Alternative
Untangling the Web: What Now?
would like to thank everyone who helped me to see this through.
Special thanks to my parents; to Yaron and Dayse (without whom I
could never have understood certain aspects of the Middle East), Anna
Maria, Leah, Natalia, and, as ever, massive thanks to Lee.
I have been very lucky with the people who have taught me over the
years: to Professor Jeremy Johns, thank you for teaching me stuff I can
still remember 20 years on (who knew the amsar would figure in a book
like this?!) and for changing the way I look at the world. To Professor Alan
Jones, thank you for being the greatest mentor ever. And to the still-verymuch-missed Dr. Elizabeth A. M. Warburton, thank you for giving me
the chance and for so much else.
A big thank you to the fantastic team at Palgrave Macmillan for all
the help and support: Veronica Goldstein, Sara Doskow, Erin Ivy, and
especially Alisa Pulver for going above and beyond the call of duty on
this project, and Dr. Farideh Koohi-Kamali for making it happen in the
first place. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewer for his very
helpful comments and for giving this project the green light. Thanks, too,
to the Newgen team including copy editor Pradeep Kumar for doing such
a wonderful job with the text.
Along with Palgrave Macmillan, I would also like to thank the trustees
of the E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Trust and acknowledge the material derived
from Professor Alan Jones's English translation of the Quran, published
by the E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Trust and reproduced here with the kind
permission of the trustees.
Finally, thanks to my great friend Rosie Cleary for her words of wisdom; and to my late grandfather William (Bill) Milford for seeing me on
my way. This one is for you.
All errors are my own.
very effort has been made to make Arabic names as easy as possible
to read. Names have not been transliterated according to academic
convention but simplified for the general reader. This might horrify purists, but it will hopefully make it easier for anyone approaching this subject for the first time.
For the same reason, place names have been simplified throughout.
The nation-states of the Middle East are relatively recent creations, and as
this text also deals with the period before they were created, in order not
to burden it with various names for the same place, phrases like "modernday Jordan" are used rather than the historic names.
Abbreviated references are given in the notes. These include the
author's name, book title, and page number. Full references including
year and name and location of publisher are given in the Bibliography.
Lost in the Labyrinth:
What's Really Going On in
the Middle East?
f you have been following recent events in the Middle East and you
are confused by the tangled web of wars and proxy wars, sectarian splits, revolutions, and counter-revolutions that are convulsing the
region, do not worry. You are not alone. Policy makers, prime ministers, and presidents alike have been wrong-footed by the dizzying
speed of change as the old order in the Arab world collapses and a new
one fights its way into existence. The post–Arab Spring Middle East is
rife with contradictions, inconsistencies, and the kind of complications
that make your head spin. Finding your way through this labyrinth is
no easy task.
Take Syria, for example. What began with a group of teenage schoolboys scribbling graffiti in Deraa calling for the overthrow of the dictator
in Damascus has escalated into a catastrophic civil war with consequences
far beyond Syria. Syria started off fighting one war—the people versus
the unelected president—and is now fighting more than half a dozen.
Damascus, the city that once ruled the Arab world, has become the stage
for just about every power struggle in the region. Democracy versus dictatorship. Sunni versus Shi'i (which really means Saudi Arabia versus Iran).
Militants versus moderates. The sacred versus the secular. Arab versus
Arab (which really means Saudi Arabia versus Qatar). Even East versus
West, as old and supposedly forgotten Cold War rivalries resurface with a
new, twenty-first-century twist.
Then, to complicate things further, militants started fighting each
other. And their fighting did not stop with them. The rise of the Islamic
State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL—rebranded as the Islamic State in the
summer of 2014) pulled yet another group into the vortex of violence: the
Kurds. Without a state of their own, the Kurds are caught in the crossfire
of other people's wars. When ISIL attacked Kurdish villages on Syria's
northern border and in Iraq, the Kurds fought back and a whole new front
opened up. ISIL, for their part, extended their reach beyond the battlefields of the Middle East. Lone wolf attacks and assassinations of soft
targets in Western cities—attacks that are deliberately designed to draw
a Western military response—opened up yet another front in this seemingly endless war.
All of these competing camps fight it out daily in the streets and
squares of Syria, while the Syrians are left to fend for themselves, abandoned and betrayed by an international community that has utterly failed
to stop the slaughter.
And even if Syrians do manage to escape the carnage, they are still not
safe. The refugee camps are not always places of refuge. All sorts of horror
stories have emerged about wealthy men from the Gulf "buying" teenage brides from the camps. In desperation to help their destitute families,
these girls are prepared to marry men they have never met: men who
often turn out to be three or four times their age and who cast them off
as soon as they become pregnant. But with essentials like food in such
short supply (the World Food Program fears its supplies are about to run
out), desperation has become a daily reality for hundreds of thousands of
Syrian families whose lives have been devastated by the war.
The chaos and contradictions of the new Middle East are not limited
to Syria. At the gateway to the Persian Gulf sits the tiny island kingdom
of Bahrain. Bahrain means "two seas," and the country's strategic position on the Strait of Hormuz has long made it the envy of empires—be it
the Portuguese or the Ottoman Empire in the medieval era or the British
and American in the modern era. Bahrain's geopolitical position has for
centuries given it a priority in international affairs far beyond its size and
strength. Over one-fifth of the world's crude oil passes through the Strait
of Hormuz. Little wonder, then, that the US Navy's Fifth Fleet is based in
the kingdom to protect that supply route. The oil-dependent global economy cannot survive without that oil and the leading industrial nations
will do whatever needs to be done to safeguard it.
In February 2011, the kingdom was rocked by the Arab Spring.
The people of Bahrain had had enough of the Khalifa family that had
been in power without plebiscite since 1783. People took to the streets in
peaceful protest calling for a democratic change.
They did not get it.
On March 14, 2011, over a thousand Saudi soldiers along with five
hundred from the United Arab Emirates arrived in Bahrain to save the
Bahraini king from his own people. The Saudi ruling family, which had
so much to say about the rights of Syrians to determine their future, had
nothing at all to say about the rights of Bahrainis to determine theirs. The
crackdown that followed was as swift as it was bloody. Protestors were
mowed down as they slept in their tented city at Pearl Roundabout in
the nation's capital, Manama. Even hospitals were not immune from the
crackdown. Doctors treating the wounded were arrested and given hefty
prison sentences.
All of which left the Western allies of Bahrain in a difficult position.
As democracies, the countries of the West publicly welcomed the Arab
Spring. They said they wanted to see democracy in the region. As proof
of their good intentions, they initiated military action against one of the
region's worst dictators. At the time of the Saudi-UAE intervention in
Bahrain, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France were frantically tabling a motion in the UN Security Council to protect the people
of Libya from Gaddafi's dictatorship. That motion, UN Security Council
Resolution 1973, was passed just days after the crackdown started in
Bahrain. Almost overnight, NATO jets were in action in Libya attacking
regime positions.
In light of the support Western countries gave to the people of Libya in
their fight for freedom, the people of Bahrain might well have expected a
similar backing. But they would be proved wrong.
The Western response to the use of violence by the Bahraini regime
against the Bahraini people was muted. There were no UN resolutions.
There were no sanctions. There were no travel bans. Thanks to the intervention of Western lobbyists and PR firms in the pay of the Bahraini ruling family, the story dropped out of international news agendas. Bahrain's
King Hamad was not to be an international pariah like Syria's Bashar alAsad or Libya's Colonel Gaddafi. In fact, less than six months after the
crackdown, British Prime Minister David Cameron welcomed the king
at Downing Street. Among other things, they discussed the situation in
Syria. They did not discuss the situation in Bahrain.
If what happened in Bahrain showed some of the inconsistencies of
Western foreign policy in the post–Arab Spring Middle East, then what
happened in Egypt in the summer of 2013 shone a spotlight on them.
In February 2011, Egyptians took to the streets in their millions calling
for the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak and the military regime he headed.
Egyptians wanted change and, unlike the Bahrainis, they got it. In June
2012, Muhammad Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood became the first
democratically elected president in Egypt's seven-thousand-year history.
Barely a year later, Egyptians took to the streets again. This time calling for the overthrow of Morsi. Rival demonstrations called for him
to stay. The military, backed by money from the Gulf, played on these
divisions and seized their chance to reclaim power. They deposed Morsi,
installed an interim regime with no democratic mandate, and began a
crackdown that was so brutal; it made the crackdown in Bahrain look
mild in comparison.
Once again, the West had little to say. When questioned about events
in Egypt, British Foreign Minister William Hague resorted to all manner of verbal gymnastics to avoid saying the "c" word. Because if what
happened in Egypt were to be acknowledged as a coup, US aid would be
cut. EU assistance would be stopped. And much-needed IMF funds for
cash-strapped Egypt would be off the table. Egypt would then be obliged
to look beyond the West for financial help. Perhaps to Moscow. And
Moscow was already reclaiming too much influence in the Middle East
for the West's liking.
There was also the issue of Israel. Egypt was the first Arab country to strike a peace deal with Israel—a deal largely underwritten by
American money and military aid. The Israeli security establishment
doubted whether President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood would
honor the treaty.
There were also behind-the-scenes murmurings that Israel's political
establishment had no desire to see a close ally of Hamas in power in the
Arab world's biggest country. But with the army-backed regime in Cairo
promising to maintain the status quo and with Morsi in prison awaiting
trial on trumped-up charges, there was no chance of anything changing.
Stability was assured. Israel's southern border appeared to be safe.
The chaos in Syria, the crackdown in Bahrain, and the coup in Egypt
are just three examples of a region in flux. Across the Middle East and
North Africa, there are further examples.
Yemen, scene of another coup, has become another failed state and a
battlefield for another proxy war. Libya is so rife with armed militias that
in 2013 even the prime minister was not safe from kidnap. By early 2015,
the country had two rival governments. Lebanon, by contrast, did not
even have one: the country's politicians could not agree on a president.
Even worse, the country has been sucked into Syria's wars and will probably not survive the crisis in its current form. Iraq is also in crisis. In 2013,
the country saw a spike in violence that is nothing short of horrific. By the
summer of 2014, the country had all but collapsed. Divided among the
Kurds in the north, ISIL in the center, and the Shi'is in the south, Iraq is
no longer functioning as a coherent political unit. To fight ISIL, Baghdad
has had to turn to Iran for help.
And in the background, far down news agendas until a new eruption
of violence explodes onto our screens and briefly reclaims the world's
attention, the region's longest running conflict between Israelis and
Palestinians chugs along, as far from resolution as it was back in 1948
when the two peoples went to war for the first time.
If all of this leaves you wondering what's really going on in the Middle
East, how this mess happened, and what is likely to happen next, the
place to start looking for answers is not in the great imperial Arab cities of Baghdad, Cairo, or Damascus. It is not even in the sacred cities
of Mecca, Medina, or Jerusalem. The place to start looking is not in the
Middle East at all.
It is in the Balkan city of Sarajevo where on a sunny summer day, over
a century ago, a man driving a car took a wrong turn and changed the
course of history.
The Tangled Web: Why the
Great Powers of Europe
Became Involved in
Sarajevo: Sunday,
The man's name was Franz Urban.
He was a chauffeur and his passengers on that sunny summer day a
century ago were two of the most important people in Europe: the heir
to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and the
archduke's wife, Sophie.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire was one of the largest in Europe. It
was also one of the oldest. It was the latest reinvention of the Habsburg
Empire whose territories in the sixteenth century had extended far beyond
Europe to include huge chunks of central and southern America. By the
twentieth century, the Habsburg dynasty had survived wars, revolution,
and bankruptcy to emerge as rulers of a central European empire stretching from Austria in the west to Ukraine in the east, Poland in the north to
Bosnia in the south. The great cities of Vienna, Budapest, and Prague all
fell within the Habsburg realm.
Multiethnic, multifaith, and multicultural, the Austro-Hungarian
Empire was an intellectual powerhouse. It was here that Sigmund
Freud founded a new science of psychoanalysis and, in doing so, forever changed how we see ourselves and how we understand sex and
sexuality. It was here that Gustav Klimt founded a new school of art, the
Secessionist, and painted the gold-hued modern icon Portrait of Adele
Bloch-Bauer 1 that would break sales records in 2007 when Ronald S.
Lauder, son of cosmetics giant Estée, bought it for his New York museum
for a staggering sum of $135,000,000, and the story of which became a
major motion picture in 2015, Woman in Gold , starring Helen Mirren
and Ryan Reynolds.
And it was here that Theodor Herzl founded a new political ideology that would have profound consequences for the future of the Middle
East: the belief that the Jewish people were a people like any other and
should have a national home of their own, an idea that came to be known
as Zionism.
Ruling such a diverse and dynamic empire meant power on a truly
grand scale, but for Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the chance to exercise
that power came at considerable personal cost. In an era of empires and
elites, the sons of one royal house were expected to marry the daughters
of another. Royal marriages were not just personal. They were political:
a good way to cement relations between foreign powers. A king could
hardly go to war with a country whose head of state was married to his
sister and whose children called him uncle. Or so the elites of Europe
thought.
This line of thinking led Europe's royal families to become so interconnected that the Romanian king was genetically German; the Greek
monarchs were really Danish; and one of the most famous Russian royals, Catherine the Great, was not Russian at all. She was a German named
Sophie. But it was Britain's Queen Victoria who set new benchmarks in
imperial intermarriage. Her children (particularly her daughters) married so strategically that by 1914 the thrones of no fewer than three of
Europe's empires—the British, the German, and the Russian—were all
occupied by Victoria's direct descendants or in-laws. Kaiser Wilhelm II
and Tsar Nicholas II were King George V's full cousins.
In this closed circle of blue blood and imperial alliances, Franz
Ferdinand committed the cardinal sin. He put his heart before his head
and married beneath him. His wife Sophie did not come from a famous
family with impressive imperial credentials. She was not even royal. She
was a minor member of the Czech aristocracy whose family had seen better days financially. And Emperor Franz Josef never let her, or her husband, forget it.1
Emperor Franz Josef had lived his adult life on the throne. Now 83 years
old, he had come to power in 1848 while still a teenager. In the near seven
decades of his reign, he had outlived several heirs. Franz Ferdinand, his
nephew, was his fourth. The emperor's treatment of his heir suggests that
if he could have appointed anyone else to fill the role he would gladly have
done so. So low was the emperor's opinion of the archduke's wife that
he made his nephew swear an oath that neither Sophie nor her children
would ever inherit the empire. To underline the point, the emperor made
sure royal protocol was strictly enforced at any event Sophie attended.
This led to bizarre scenes at state receptions where Sophie was treated as
a low provincial aristocrat rather than the wife of the future emperor. She
would be seated at the bottom of the table away from her husband and, in
royal processions, was obliged to walk at the end of the line alone.2
The royal couple bore these private slights and public humiliations
and enjoyed their life together. June 28, 1914, was their wedding anniversary, and photographs taken early in the day show a genuinely happy
couple. They sit smiling in the back of their open-top car. Sophie holds
a bunch of flowers and looks on while her husband shakes hands with a
local dignitary.
Franz Ferdinand and his wife were in Bosnia on official business. The
archduke had come to oversee the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Army Corps
on maneuvers in the border province. Security was a pressing concern
for the empire because the Balkan region was in a state of upheaval. But
exactly how much the Habsburgs knew about what was really going on
beyond their borders and how prepared they were to deal with it remains
an open question. The empire's intelligence chief, Colonel Alfred Redl,
had been arrested the year before, caught red-handed passing secrets to
the Russians. Partly to keep his personal life private (he was gay) and
partly to fund his lavish lifestyle (he had very expensive taste), the colonel
had duped his political masters for a decade. After being interrogated,
Colonel Redl was given a gun and left alone to do the honorable thing.
The scandal was hushed up but the damage was done. At a time when the
Habsburg Empire's southern borders were simmering with discontent,
Vienna was relying on faulty intelligence.3
The province that the archduke was visiting, Bosnia, was bordered
by Serbia and Montenegro. Both were newly independent after centuries
as provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Other Balkan countries were also
recent additions to the map of Europe: Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, and
Greece had all recently broken away from Istanbul's control, often with
the help of one of the Great Powers. Britain and Russia, in particular, were
ruthlessly Machiavellian about using the Balkans to score points against
their imperial rival in Istanbul.
For the new Balkan states, however, independence brought new problems. They had freedom but no peace. In 1912, and again in 1913, several
of these countries went to war with each other over unfulfilled territorial ambitions. State creation is not an exact science, and the lines on the
new map of Europe were not drawn cleanly and people frequently found
themselves on the wrong side of a new border. There were, for example,
large numbers of Serbs in Bosnia who wanted to be citizens of the Serbian
state rather than subjects of the ageing Austrian emperor.
All of this presented a challenge to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It
was not just that Vienna needed to protect the empire's southern border
from invasion or another Balkan war. The real threat to the empire was
ideological. The newly formed Balkan states were based on the idea of
nation. A nation-state saw people with a common language and (usually)
a common religion draw on their shared historical experience and come
together to create a shared future destiny. Italy's city-states did it in 1870,
Germany's principalities in 1871. Both were thriving.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, nationalism was one of the
most influential political ideologies. With its focus on ethnic unity, it
was the polar opposite of the transnationalism of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire where no fewer than 12 languages were spoken and at least four
religions were freely practiced. To this day, Budapest still has the largest
synagogue in Europe.
The problem for a transnational empire like Austro-Hungary was that
some of the nationalities in it were more equal than others. The empire's
name gave its priorities away: the Austrians and Hungarians were politically more important than everyone else. The Austrians, in turn, were
more important than the Hungarians. Franz Ferdinand planned to
address this imbalance when he became emperor and aimed to make
the empire more equal.4 In the meantime, nationalism gained strength
among the empire's minorities who saw it as a way to achieve their goal
of independence.
These minorities were encouraged by the success of their Balkan
brothers. Like the minorities in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the people of the Balkans had once belonged to a vast transnational empire—the
Ottoman—that spanned three continents and was a veritable Babel of
languages and peoples. But like the empire in Vienna, the one in Istanbul
also had a dominant culture. And Istanbul's Turkish and Islamic culture
was not shared by the Serbs, Bulgarians, and Greeks who lived in the
empire's European provinces. So when the Serbs, Bulgarians, and Greeks
broke away from Istanbul, the minorities in the Habsburg Empire started
to entertain hopes of breaking free of Vienna.
Discontent had been bubbling beneath the surface in the provinces of
the Austrian Empire for years. And on June 28, 1914, the empire's heir and
his wife walked blithely into the maelstrom of that long-simmering discontent. The date, emotionally significant for them personally, was even
more significant for local Serbs. It was National Day in Serbia, marking
one of the defining moments of Serb history: the Battle of Kosovo Polje
(the Field of Blackbirds) against the Ottomans in 1389 when the Serbs, led
by King Lazar, were defeated. Lazar was killed. The Kingdom of Serbia
was reduced to a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire. The saving grace for
Serb honor was that they did not go down without a fight. One of their
fighters assassinated the Ottoman sultan, Murad I, on the battlefield. 5
On this day heavy with so much history, the imperial couple began
their official visit. Soon after they arrived in the city, a young man in the
midst of a crowd of cheering well-wishers lobbed a bomb at their car.
The bomb bounced off and crashed into the oncoming car carrying
the archduke's staff. There were injuries but no fatalities. The injured
men were taken to hospital. The attacker was caught. The archduke and
duchess continued their journey to the City Hall for an official reception.
Arriving at the City Hall, the archduke was overheard asking one of the
local dignitaries, "So you welcome your guests here with bombs?" But
other than that, he and his wife appeared remarkably unruffled by the
attempt on their lives.6
The attack was carried out by six young Serbs from a radical group
called Young Bosnia whose aim was to free Bosnia from Vienna's control
and unite it with the rest of Serbia. Trained and armed across the border
in Belgrade, the young men were sent into Bosnia with orders to hit at
the heart of Austrian imperial power. Franz Ferdinand's visit to Sarajevo
provided an ideal, high-profile opportunity to do it.
But the Young Bosnians were not professional soldiers. And as far
as would-be assassins went, they were not really up to the job. One of
them, Gavrilo Princip, was actually ill with tuberculosis. By the time the
archduke arrived at the City Hall, it looked as if their mission had failed
miserably.
When the imperial couple finished their visit to City Hall, they decided
to deviate from their official agenda and visit the hospital where the
injured officers were being treated. This meant a change in their planned
route. Their driver, Franz Urban, did not know the new route. When he
came to the intersection between Franzjosefstrasse and Appel Quay, he
took the wrong turn. The street was so narrow that he could not turn the
car around. He had to brake, go into reverse, and go back down the street
at a snail's pace.
A young man idling at the street corner suddenly spotted the opentopped car crawling the street. He was Gavrilo Princip. The royal couple
were just a few feet away from Princip. The 19-year-old wasted no time.
He pulled out his gun and fired twice. Both shots hit their target. Franz
Ferdinand and Sophie were dead by the time they reached hospital.7
Within weeks, Europe was at war.
The imperial system of alliances, so carefully constructed over so
many years to maintain the balance of power in Europe and to prevent
war, now kicked in and brought about the very war they were designed
to prevent.
After the assassination in Sarajevo, Austro-Hungary issued an ultimatum to Serbia, the terms of which were almost impossible to fulfill. Even
so, Serbia tried. But one of the stumbling blocks to any resolution was the
rapidly developing international nature of the crisis.
Germany was joined by geography and linked by language with
Austro-Hungary, and Berlin now urged Vienna to stand their ground.
(Vienna, it has to be said, needed little encouragement.) Russia was Slavic
like Serbia and followed the same Orthodox faith, and St. Petersburg now
urged Belgrade to stand theirs.
To complicate matters further, Russia was allied by treaty with Britain
and France, which meant anyone taking on St. Petersburg would have to
fight on more than one front.
It was to avoid that very scenario that Germany decided to invoke the
"Schlieffen Plan." Named after the general who devised it, this plan would
see Germany invading France from the north, via Belgium and Holland,
in a lightning strike that would knock France out of the war and leave
Germany free to fight Russia.
The problem for Germany was that Britain and France had been legal
guarantors of Belgium's neutrality since 1839. The British government sent
an ultimatum to Berlin reminding them as much. The Germans ignored
it. On August 4, the day the ultimatum was due to expire, Germany went
ahead and invaded Belgium.
Cousinly kinship between the royal houses of Europe counted for
nothing now. On August 4, 1914, five of Europe's great empires were at
war. On one side were Germany and Austro-Hungary. On the other were
Britain, France, and Russia. The Ottoman Empire would soon join the
German side. And because these empires, with the exception of AustroHungary, all had extensive overseas territories, this war would not be
confined to the continent where it started.
The Middle East would be particularly affected. European powers,
mainly Britain and France, had taken over much of the region during the
nineteenth century. The First World War would provide them with the
opportunity to seize control of even more of it.
But what brought these Great Powers into the Arab world in the first
place had nothing at all to do with the high politics of war and peace. It
was much more mundane than that.
It was money.
The British Empire and
the Arab World:
Ambition, Austerity,
The sovereign of Egypt had grand ambitions.
His name was Ismail (r. 1863–79) and he was the grandson of
Muhammad Ali, the man widely regarded as the founder of modern
Egypt. Muhammad Ali was one of those giants of history who start with
nothing and end with everything. An illiterate soldier from Macedonia, he
arrived in Egypt as part of the Ottoman sultan's army against Napoleon's
disastrous invasion of 1798. He never left.
His success was based on his military skills, and in 1805 those skills
saw him promoted to pasha, or ruler. From then, until his death in 1848,
he ruled Egypt as his personal fief, his obedience to Istanbul little more
than lip service. At times, he fought alongside the sultan's forces—and
at times he fought against them. Which side he took depended on where
his personal interests lay. In 1841, the Ottoman Sultan Abdulmajid recognized this reality and took a new approach to secure his erstwhile
ally's loyalty. He made him royal. Egypt would remain a province of
the Ottoman Empire, but Muhammad Ali had the power to appoint his
own successors.1
On his death, Muhammad Ali was succeeded first by his son Ibrahim
(r. 1848), then by a grandson Abbas (r. 1848–54), then by another son
Said (1854–63). Said is remembered as the man who commissioned the
Suez Canal. But it was Muhammad Ali's grandson Ismail (r. 1863–79)
who inherited the full force of the patriarch's driving ambition and who
set about remaking Egypt in a modern mold.
Inspired by a visit to France in 1867 for the World Exhibition, Ismail
decided to build a New Paris on the Nile. Not for him were the crowded
quarters and the twisting, winding alleyways of Cairo's old city. Under
Ismail, the medieval was cast aside and Cairo was redrawn to accommodate wide Haussmann-esque boulevards. Entire suburbs were transformed. An opera house was built. Public parks, gardens, and open
spaces dotted the city. And the changes were not just cosmetic. The latest technology was imported from Europe along with the latest architecture and culture. Telegraphs, street lighting, railways, irrigation projects,
European-style schools including schools for girls and technical colleges,
all became part of the landscape of the new Egypt.
And the crowning glory of this modernized Egypt was the Suez Canal.
Its construction revolutionized Egypt's place in the world. Egypt was no
longer a country off the beaten track that travelers, traders, and troops
had to make a special effort to reach. It was now fully incorporated into
international trade routes. Thanks to the canal, trade between Europe
and the East was able to bypass the long and expensive route round the
African Cape. With shipping costs drastically reduced, Egypt became
nothing less than the pivot between East and West.
No expense was spared for the canal's grand opening in November
1869. It was a French engineer, Ferdinand de Lesseps, who designed the
canal, so the honor of opening it was given to French Empress Eugénie.
Legend has it that Ismail had a palace specially built in Cairo's island suburb of Zamalek for her. Verdi was commissioned to write a new opera,
Aida, for the occasion. (It was not ready in time so they made do with
Rigoletto.) Egypt's reinvention as a modern nation was complete. Ismail
went as far as to declare his country was now part of Europe.
There was just one problem. Egypt did not have the money to pay for any
of it. And within six years of the canal opening, Egypt was bankrupt.
In fairness to Ismail, the mess was not all of his making. His uncle Said
had launched the Suez project and he awarded the contract for building
the canal to his close friend, Ferdinand de Lesseps, and he did so on terms
wholly unfavorable to Egypt. Cairo was burdened with all the costs of
constructing the canal in return for only a minority share of the potential
profits, which meant that even though the canal quickly became a huge
financial success, the beneficiaries were the European shareholders of the
canal's holding company not the Egyptian exchequer. 2
Adding to the pile of financial losses, Egypt financed the canal's construction with loans from European banks, which were leveraged at such
high rates of interest; it was debatable if Egypt could ever repay them,
regardless of how profitable the canal turned out to be.
THE BRITISH EMPIRE AND THE ARAB WORLD
And, as if all of these were not enough, there were issues about
Ismail's rebranding of Egypt as a European country. As part of his strategy, he imported the trappings of European progress but not Europe's
economic or political model. The city of Paris, which had impressed
him so much during his visit in 1867, was supported by a solid manufacturing industry, a productive farming sector, a thriving banking
community, and trade from a worldwide empire. Egypt had none of
these. Even its most successful export was not as economically productive as it could have been. Egypt's farming sector was overly reliant
on one crop, cotton, and overly reliant on one customer, the mills in
Lancashire, England. 3
Then there was the issue of Ismail's financial relations with Istanbul.
In return for doubling the yearly tribute to the Ottoman sultan, from 1866
Ismail was allowed to call himself " khedive," the Persian for sovereign. He
was also granted the right to introduce the principle of primogeniture.
The right of the first-born son to inherit power was not widely practiced
in Muslim monarchies. Ever since the dynastic principle was introduced
into the Muslim world in the seventh century, the ruling family as a unit
took precedence over any individual line of it. Caliphs and sultans often
tried to pass power to their direct descendants, but the wider family
always won in the end. With this grant from the sultan, Ismail succeeded
where so many before him had failed. But he had to pay for the privilege
and it was one more thing he could not afford.4
In 1875, the entire house of cards collapsed. Egypt's foreign debt was
now roughly the same size as the country's entire economy. There was
simply no way to balance the books. Bankruptcy prompted a fire sale of
assets. The khedive's most desirable financial asset was his 40 percent
stake (just over 175,000 shares) in the Suez Canal's holding company,
the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez. The company's
majority shareholders were French, and to maintain French influence, a
number of French banks expressed interest in buying the khedive out. De
Lesseps himself was said to have made an offer.
But this was to be Britain's moment. The world's greatest maritime
power with a global empire on which the sun never set needed access to
the Suez Canal more than anyone else. British Prime Minister Benjamin
Disraeli was acutely aware of just how important the canal was to British
imperial interests. He acted swiftly. With an informality that would be
unthinkable nowadays, Disraeli rushed round to the house of his friend
Baron Lionel de Rothschild and borrowed the four million pounds Britain
needed to buy the khedive's shares.
And with that, the deal was done.5
Buying the khedive's shares was a triumph for Disraeli.
By acting so quickly, he made sure Britain had a role in determining
the future of the canal. Half of Britain's shipping to India went through
Suez. In the short time since the canal opened, it had become too important to Britain's strategic interests to allow London's arch imperial rival,
France, to gain control of the company that ran it. Had the French succeeded in doing so, it would have given Paris the power to strangle
British shipping. After the sale, Britain and France set their imperial
rivalry aside to put up a united front in defense of their own interests
against Egypt. It was a policy both parties held right up to the Suez War
In 1879, London and Paris began strengthening their position in Egypt
by taking control of the country's finances. In theory, the debt management agency, the Caisse de la Dette (or the European Debt Commission),
which was set up to sort out Egypt's financial crisis, was neutral of outside
political interference. In theory, it was a body made up of independent
financial experts whose job was to make sure Egypt did not default on its
debts to European banks. In reality, it was the Trojan horse for a full-scale
European takeover of Egypt.
In the same year the debt agency started its work, Paris and London
put pressure on the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II (himself in the same
kind of financial trouble as Khedive Ismail and for much the same reasons) to allow them to depose Ismail in favor of his young son Tawfiq.
Needless to say, the sultan who needed a European bailout just as much
as the Egyptians did was not about to argue.6
To Egyptians, it was clear that the ease with which Britain and France
achieved their goals owed less to the power of their ideas than the power of
their money. Egyptians knew Egypt could not compete against European
domination on those terms, so they turned to the power of their military.
The hero of the hour was an army officer named Ahmad Urabi who came
from a peasant family. A son of the land himself, Urabi understood the
grievances of ordinary people. His rising popularity soon alarmed the
British and French. Their worries were validated when Urabi was arrested
in 1880, thrown in jail, and the Egyptian army refused to detain him.
Instead, he was appointed to the cabinet. Once there, he proceeded to
push the khedive out.
That was the final straw for the British. They feared a popular leader
who enjoyed the support of the military and the masses would challenge
Anglo-French control of the canal. In what was to become a long-standing feature of British policy in this part of the world, London claimed to
have no selfish interests in Egypt, to be acting solely against a military
dictator, and to have absolutely no intention of occupying the country.
Then, with the full backing of the French, they did exactly the opposite
and sent the troops in.
What began with a massive naval bombardment on Alexandria on July
11, 1882, ended with the defeat of Urabi's forces in the battle at Tell alKabir near Cairo just two months later on September 13. Urabi was sent
packing.7 Later, he would be honored as the founding father of Egyptian
nationalism. One of the main streets in downtown Cairo bears his name
to this day. But for now, he was off into exile while the British made themselves at home in Egypt. For the next 70 years.
For London, victory in Egypt secured a key strategic objective.
Since the opening of the Suez Canal, Egypt had been the missing link
on the route from Britain to India. So central was India to British imperial strategy that securing the route was nothing short of an obsession. It
was not enough to control the subcontinent itself. Every part of the way
there had to be subdued in one way or another; if for no other reason
than to prevent an imperial rival hoisting their flag over it. As a result,
Britain viewed every country from the English Channel to the Hindu
Kush mountain range as future friend or foe.
Prior to 1882, Britain had access to a number of coaling stations in
the Mediterranean: Gibraltar, Malta, and Cyprus. London also had treaties with many of the families who ruled the coastal enclaves along the
Persian Gulf. Under the terms of these agreements, British ships traveling
to and from India were allowed to dock and refuel in their ports in return
for British payment and "protection"—a diplomatic way of offering the
undiplomatic choice "you are either with us or against us."
From as far back as 1798, the British had worked with the sultan of
Muscat in Oman. In 1820, they concluded a treaty with the ruling families of the Trucial States on the eastern side of the Gulf (now known as the
United Arab Emirates). In 1839, the British occupied Aden in modernday Yemen, which was the most important port on the sea route between
Egypt and India.
By the middle of the century, it was the turn of the Bu Said family in
Oman to join the British sphere of influence. By 1861, the Khalifa family
on the island of Bahrain had decided to do the same. These treaties were
alliances of mutual convenience. The British used them to secure a key
stage of the route to India at minimal cost. The Arab rulers for their part
used them to secure power against local rivals. And they did it well: these
ruling families remain in power to this day. 8
With Egypt now a link in this imperial chain of ports and overseas
bases, London could relax. British sea power was secure. Now all London
had to do was find someone to rule the land of the Sphinx.
They found their man in Evelyn Baring, otherwise known as Lord
Cromer.
Baring was a bastion of the British establishment. A military man,
Baring was the grandson of an admiral, the son of a member of parliament, and he himself had served as a soldier on three continents before
going to work in the Indian service. His paternal family, the Barings,
owned the bank of that name.
Aside from securing the Suez Canal, Britain intervened in Egypt to
make sure the country repaid its loans to European banks. From London's
point of view, who better than a Baring to look after the interests of Britain
and her banks?9
In 1883, now in his forties, Cromer arrived in Cairo to take up the
post of Consul General with powers that would have made a pharaoh
blush. Cromer's aim was not to rule Egypt—Britain, to the end, maintained the fiction that Egypt was not a colony—but "to rule the rulers of Egypt." And Cromer had the force of character to impose this
system of indirect dictatorship. No shrinking violet, his colleagues in
India referred to him as "Over-Baring." To Egyptians, he was simply
"The Lord."
For the next 24 years, Cromer ruled Egypt in all but name. With a
relatively small number of British troops, he managed to embed British
authority across the country. With an equally small number of British
bureaucrats, he managed to perform feats of financial wizardry and balance the Egyptian books. Surplus cash was available for investment in
public works, especially agriculture and irrigation, and cotton production soared at a time when its price was booming in the international
market. It was during Cromer's era that the first Aswan Dam was built
(1906). He was also responsible for abolishing the hated corvée, the system
of forced labor, which allowed wealthy landowners to force ordinary men
into unpaid work for unlimited periods of time.10
It was measures like these that justified British rule in their own eyes.
More than anything else, Cromer and his fellow members of the imperial elite believed Britain brought fiscal stability and the rule of law to
Egypt.11 Corruption was so endemic in the country that wealthy absentee
landowners could confiscate the cotton crop of their tenants, plough a
road through their holdings, or cut off their water supply, and the farmers
could do nothing to stop them.
The British, by contrast, wanted all Egyptians to be subject to the same
law. The fact that peasants could not afford access to it was something the
British authorities did not seem to consider.
The truth was that the British did not need to justify their occupation
of Egypt to themselves. The late nineteenth century was the high watermark of international imperialism, and Egypt was a welcome addition
to the British Empire. And Egypt was not just any country. The land of
the Sphinx held a special fascination for Victorian England. Victorian
society was a curious, contradictory mix of Puritanism and pleasure, and
Egypt with its Biblical associations, Classical connections, and exoticism
seemed to have something for everyone. It was here that Moses received
the Ten Commandments and led the Jews from captivity to freedom
in the Promised Land. It was here that Antony romanced Cleopatra in
a doomed seduction immortalized by England's national playwright
Shakespeare. And it was here that the intrepid explorer, sexual adventurer, and translator of the Kama Sutra, Sir Richard Burton, risked his
life and liberty to embark on his secret pilgrimage to Mecca in 1853; a
feat that so captured the imagination of Victorian society, the book of the
journey became a bestseller when it was published in 1855 and continues
to sell today.
For the British administrators sent to work in Egypt, the country
became a home away from home. Zamalek, the island suburb in the
middle of the Nile, was a virtual British enclave where they recreated the
world they knew and lived as a class apart. Often their only real contact
with anyone Egyptian was with their servants and chauffeurs.
British women yielded nothing to their environment and continued
to behave and dress as if they were in a sitting room in Surrey or a ballroom in Belgravia rather than living on the edge of an African desert.
Afternoons were whiled away having tea at Shepheard's British Hotel or
drinking gin pahits at the country club.
The British sense of splendid isolation extended to education and
sport. The British established their own schools where their children were
taught in their own language by their own people and where they studied
the same subjects they would have studied back in Britain.
They also brought their pastimes to Egypt: most notably, football. To
this day, the football club in Zamalek still has not broken fully free of its
foreign associations. By contrast, its main Cairo rival, al-Ahly (meaning
national) set up in 1907 by Egyptians for Egyptians, has none of Zamalek's
imperial baggage.12
The British presence in Egypt was reinforced throughout the year by
a steady stream of tourists from the home country. Cairo was a mustsee destination for the more adventurous of the Grand Tourists and for
travelers en route to the Holy Land. It was also a stopping-off point for the
many British administrators traveling to and from India.
But what of the people whose country this was? What did the Egyptians
make of the British occupation of their land?
As a proud people with a civilization stretching seven millennia, the
Egyptians viewed the British occupation as nothing short of a national
humiliation. Muslim since 641, part of the Ottoman Empire since 1517,
Egypt now had to come to terms with the rule of a non-Muslim power.
The physical occupation and subsequent loss of sovereignty were just
one part of the problem. Even more of an affront to Egyptian national
pride was the patronizing nature of British power. Repeatedly, the British
claimed they were not occupying Egypt. Repeatedly, they claimed they
were only there to sort out the country's finances. Repeatedly, they
claimed they would leave as soon as they could find a stable government
to replace them.
Yet British actions repeatedly contradicted their words. They did
nothing to encourage the development of a local political class that could
replace them. Quite the reverse: they turned the khedives into little more
than figureheads. First, they deposed Ismail (r. 1863–79) and set up a
legislative assembly to rubberstamp their decisions. Next, they stripped
Ismail's son Tawfiq (r. 1879–92) of any real power. Then, they deposed
Tawfiq's successor son Abbas II (r. 1892–1914) at the start of the First
World War and declared Egypt a protectorate of the British Empire.
From the outset, Cromer ran Egypt in the interests of the rulers not
of the ruled. Even his successful restructuring of the country's debts was
for the benefit of Britain's banks, not for the Egyptians themselves. And
having made Egypt safe for European capital, Cromer, scion of a banking
dynasty that he was, encouraged these same banks to invest there to help
small-scale farmers. But this too was done for the benefit of the banks.
They needed new markets for their capital and he provided them.13
Cromer's capital investment programs, particularly in irrigation and
agriculture, were also done with both eyes fixed firmly on Europe. With
more land reclaimed and more water available, the country became even
more reliant on cotton production than it had been back in the days of
Muhammad Ali. This lack of diversification was dangerous in the long
term, but, as with the debt program, it was done to meet the needs of
the international economy rather than to improve the living standards of
the ordinary Egyptian farmer. Under British rule, Egypt was deliberately
integrated into the world economy on terms unfavorable to Egypt. The
impact was divisive and felt throughout society. The rich elite who traded
with Europe became much richer and the poor became much, much
poorer. All of this meant wealthy landowners could still exploit the fellaheen farmers who worked their land whatever way they wanted, corvée
or no corvée.
This structural imbalance in the nation's finances was repeated in
the country's education system. Cromer and the men who followed him,
such as Consul Generals Sir Eldon Gorst (r. 1907–11) and Lord Kitchener
(r. 1911 until the First World War), made little or no investment in the public education system. Rich Egyptians could afford to send their children
to private schools—most of which were British-run with classes taught in
English—while poor Egyptians had to make do with the underresourced
state sector. In such circumstances, social mobility was nonexistent. And
in such circumstances, it was unlikely that a class of Egyptians would ever
emerge who were rebellious, educated, and articulate. The imperial logic
was that the rich Egyptians who benefited from the status quo would not
rock the boat and the poor would not know how to.14
Divisions in Egypt were further reinforced by the law. The British may
well have believed they were making all Egyptians equal before it, but
they placed all non-Egyptians above it. To do this, they took advantage
of a legal loophole dating back to 1569. Known as the Capitulations, these
legal measures allowed foreign citizens living in the Ottoman Empire
to claim legal redress under the laws of their own country. The Great
Powers exploited the loophole to give their own citizens virtual immunity from prosecution. In Egypt, it was particularly useful for British
businesses setting up after 1882 as they were not subject to local law. It
was also useful to protect British soldiers from potential prosecution.
For Egyptians, this legal gap between occupier and occupied was thrown
into sharp relief by what happened in a village in the Nile Delta one summer day in 1906.
In June of that year, a group of British officers went out pigeon-shooting in the village of Dinshaway. They were supposed to seek permission
from the locals before doing so and, to avoid any potential accidents, let
the villagers know in advance when they were coming. On this occasion,
they did neither. In the course of the shoot, a local woman was shot by a
British soldier.
Then all hell broke loose. A fight ensued. Shots were fired. There were
casualties and fatality on both sides. But only Egyptians were prosecuted.
Over two hundred were arrested. After what was little more than a show
trial, four residents of Dinshaway were convicted and publicly hanged
two weeks later. Local people were forced to go and watch the executions.
Sentences of hard labor were given to two other men, and many more
local men were publicly flogged.
For Egyptians, the Dinshaway Incident became a notorious example
of the contradictions of the British presence in their country: the British
claimed to be in Egypt to uphold the rule of law, but they did so only when
it suited their own interests. And there was nothing the Egyptians could
do to stop it.
One of the most popular children's books in Victorian Britain was Lewis
Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). And the British presence in Egypt had something of a surreal, wonderland quality to it. When
the British peered through the looking glass at the country around them,
they saw what they wanted to see, not what was there. Empire distorted
the view, threw a veil over their real intentions, and created a form of diplomatic doublespeak that exists to this day when it comes to dealing with
the realities of the Middle East.
Empire allowed a man like Cromer to assume the right to speak for
women in Egypt when he railed against the veil as a symbol of all that was
wrong with Islam. Yet back home, he was so opposed to British women
being given the vote he founded an organization to lobby against it: the
Men's League for Opposing Women's Suffrage.
Empire allowed Cromer to make bold sweeping statements such as:
"The Egyptians should be permitted to govern themselves after the fashion
in which Europeans think they ought to be governed."15 As if Egyptians
should be given the right to choose their own government when—and
only when—they could be relied upon to choose one that matched the
ambitions and interests of Europe's Great Powers.
Empire allowed contradictions like these to flourish. On rare occasions, Cromer admitted as much. "The English as imperialists," he said,
"are always striving to attain two ideals which are apt to be mutually
destructive—the ideal of good government, which connotes the continuing of his supremacy, and the ideal of self-government, which connotes
the whole or partial abdication of his supreme position."16
It was a contradiction the British never resolved. Their great imperial
rivals, the French, would try a different tack in the parts of the Arab world
they occupied. But there was one key area of common ground between
London and Paris. Like the British, it was not matters of war and peace
that brought the French into the Arab world, it was money.
The French Empire and
the Arab World: From
the Crusades to the
Civilizing Mission
In 1830, the French invaded Algeria. They stayed for the next 132 years.
This long occupation that was to culminate in a devastating war with
catastrophic consequences for both countries began because of an incident that bordered on the ridiculous.
In the 1820s France owed Algeria money. Algeria supplied France
with grain, particularly for the French army, and the French had not paid
their bills. In April 1827, a meeting was held between the Algerian ruler,
the dey, and the French ambassador to discuss the debts. It turned into a
showdown.
The dey pressed for payment of the bills. The ambassador fudged. The
arguments became heated. Then, as the ambassador later recorded in his
official report to Paris, the dey lost his temper and struck him with his fly
whisk, an assault the dey vehemently denied.
Given that a fly whisk is not intended for use on anything larger than
a fly, it is hard to imagine what damage the dey could have done had he
indeed wielded it against the ambassador. But the ambassador was adamant and demanded an apology for the affront to French honor.
The dey refused to apologize for something he had not done. Besides,
the French still had not paid their debts. Should the ambassador not concentrate on that?
The ambassador, playing the role of wounded party to perfection,
ratcheted up the pressure, and before long the diplomatic equivalent of a
duel was underway.
Back in Paris, Charles X was only too glad of the distraction. France
was again in revolutionary mood. French troops had recently returned
from action in the Greek War of Independence. A deployment that had
not gone well. A foreign policy success elsewhere was needed to regain
lost prestige, and Algeria offered it.1
Part of the Ottoman Empire since 1529, Algeria enjoyed a large measure of independence from Istanbul. As long as taxes were paid and the
sultan's name was mentioned in Friday prayers, the ruler of Algeria was
left to his own devices. From the mid-1600s, the region had been ruled
by a military caste, one of whose members took the title "dey." In 1830,
the ruling dey, Hussein, was about to find himself facing the full force
of French firepower. In the summer of that year, the French navy bombarded the Algerian coast. The Algerian armies were no match for the
French forces and the fighting was soon over.
It was a diplomatic and political triumph for the French. Their ambassador had successfully elevated the fly whisk farce into a major international incident and their government had successfully manipulated
it into the legal justification for a full-scale assault on Algeria. It said
a lot about the asymmetrical nature of imperial finances that, in 1882,
Britain would invade Egypt because Egypt owed Britain money, whereas
France invaded Algeria even though France owed Algeria money. The
sheer scale of imperial power made such inconsistencies irrelevant to the
capitals of Europe.
French debts were well and truly forgotten. In this age of empires, the
French now had a foothold in Africa and the way south to the heart of the
continent lay open before them. All they had to do was secure the rest of
Algeria.
This proved to be a much more difficult task than anyone in Paris had
anticipated. Resistance came in the form of a 25-year-old named Abd alQadir, whose father was leader of the Qadariyya order of Sufi ascetics. 2
Sufis take their name from the Arabic word for wool (suf ) describing the
woolen cloaks they wear to symbolize austerity and their disconnection
from worldly affairs. Outside Islam, they are known for the spectacular,
near-acrobatic displays of their whirling dervishes. The Sufi laser-like
focus on the sacred did not, however, make them retreat from the world
in the way Christian monks did. Throughout Islamic history, members of
Sufi orders have taken up arms to fight for their faith, and they now did
so in Algeria against the French.
Abd al-Qadir mobilized his forces and used Sufi hostels or khanqas as
their logistical base. These were buildings run by the Sufis where travelers
could stay for the night and perform their prayers in the adjacent mosque.
These hostels became the hubs in Abd al-Qadir's network of resistance
THE FRENCH EMPIRE AND THE ARAB WORLD
and enabled his fighters to move across the region, pass on information,
and receive arms, all while posing as pilgrims or traders. Abd al-Qadir
also enjoyed massive support from tribes across Algeria, as well as the
patronage of the ruler of Morocco.
For nine years, from 1832 and 1841, he held this motley band of brothers together and waged his war so successfully that the French were at a
loss about how to deal with him.
Ultimately, Abd al-Qadir became a victim of his own success. Since
conventional methods were not working against him, the French resorted
to unconventional ones. In 1841, a new French general was deployed to
Algeria with a new agenda. General Thomas-Robert Bugeaud was determined to subdue the territory whatever it took. In an era long before the
Geneva Conventions governed the rules of war, war had no rules. So the
French responded to any attack on their authority with overwhelming
force. The novelist Maupassant, no fan of French imperial adventures,
sums up the army's casual attitude to the people of Algeria with devastating clarity in his novel Bel-Ami. He has Georges Duroy (the lead character
and the Bel-Ami of the title) kill three Arabs during his military service
in Algeria and get away with it because the French military did not much
care what happened to an Arab.3
Right across the region, collective punishment became the norm. Crops
were ruined. Villages destroyed. Communities displaced and sometimes
killed. All with the aim of dividing to conquer.4
And it worked. In 1847, Abd al-Qadir surrendered. He had no choice.
His supporters were suffering too much. In victory, the French showed a
generosity they had not shown in war. There was no show trial or public
execution for the Algerian rebel leader. He was sent into exile, first to
Paris where he was received by the great and the good as an equal, and
then to Damascus, the city he chose for his retirement.
With Abd al-Qadir gone, the French were free to concentrate on ruling
Algeria. Years later, the British were content to rule Egypt from the splendid isolation of their island enclave on the Nile. As long as Egypt paid its
debts, grew its cotton, and kept the canal open, the British were content
to remain a class apart. Not so the French in Algeria.
The French, unlike the British, were on a mission. They were going to
"civilize" Algeria. They were going to turn it into part of France.
The efforts to colonize Algeria began in earnest with the arrival of
General Bugeaud in 1841. It was not the first time the French had tried
to put down roots in Arab land. Nearly eight hundred years earlier,
the Crusades had been launched from French soil. It was in the French
town of Clermont on November 26, 1095, that Pope Urban II issued a
call to arms for Christians to reclaim the Holy City of Jerusalem from
the Muslim "infidel." In return, these crusading warriors were promised
nothing short of salvation.
Over 150,000 men responded, many of them from France. But this
army of Christian soldiers was anything but holy. They were a rag-tag
bunch of thrill-seekers looking for excitement, criminals looking for
escape, mercenaries looking for plunder, second sons from noble families
looking for a fief, traders looking for goods and markets, and penitents
looking for redemption. Within two years they were on their way, and
within another two, they had succeeded. For the first time since the seventh century, Jerusalem was Christian again.5
The loss of Jerusalem, the third Holiest City in Islam, to the Christians
in 1099 and the Crusaders' decision to celebrate by massacring the city's
population stunned Muslims. The Arab Muslim world was a relatively
self-contained one, used to dealing with the outside world on its own
terms. This was the first time a European army had penetrated the House
of Islam and the experience was so searing that even now, nearly a thousand years later, you can still hear Western intervention in the Middle
East referred to as "Crusader aggression."
For the next two centuries, Crusaders carved out principalities along
the Mediterranean coastline. Cities like Antioch and Acre, Jaffa and
Jerusalem, Tripoli and Tyre had Latin kings rather than Muslim sultans. Many of these Latin kings were French and the mini-states they
ruled were the forerunner of nineteenth-century colonies: outposts
of European influence backed up by European military might and
European popular opinion. A tour of duty in the East became almost
a rite of passage for Christian kings. England's Richard the Lion Heart,
Germany's Frederick Barbarossa, France's Louis IX: all made their way
eastwards to lead Crusades.
Ultimately, it was all to no avail. Saladin, the great hero of the Arabs
(who was actually a Kurd), recaptured Jerusalem in 1187. Then Louis IX's
Sixth Crusade in 1249–50 ended in defeat for the Europeans in Egypt.
And toward the end of thirteenth century, in 1291, the Mamluk military
rulers of Egypt took the fight directly to the Crusaders and defeated the
last of their strongholds on the coast of modern Lebanon.
But if the Crusades left a lasting impression on the Arab world, they
also made an impact in Europe. The great historian of the Middle East,
Philip Hitti, notes in his epic History of the Arabs that "the Christians
came to the Holy Land with the notion that they were far superior to
its people, whom they considered idolaters, worshipping Muhammad as
God."6 Although the Europeans who stayed in the Holy Land often lost
that sense of superiority, the people who set the Crusades in motion never
did. In the highest echelons of the political and religious establishment of
Europe, there remained a firm belief that the Crusades were a just cause
because they sought to bring enlightenment to a people living in spiritual
darkness. According to this view, the fact that Muslims—those people
living in spiritual darkness who could not tell the difference between
Muhammad and God—had the audacity to win left a legacy in Europe of
unfinished business with the East.
Centuries later, Napoleon laid claim to that very legacy and that same
sense of superiority and crusading zeal to justify his invasion of Egypt in
July 1798. Without the slightest hint of irony, Napoleon told Egyptians
that he, like them, was a Muslim, and he had come to Egypt because the
country's Mamluk rulers were not as good Muslims as the French. He
even planned to write his own Quran. What he really meant was he had
invaded Egypt to save the Egyptians from themselves.
What made Napoleon's declaration even stranger than his professed
belief in Islam was the fact that the French Revolution of 1789 had swept
aside all religions in favor of reason and rationalism. So the French were
not really bringing the enlightenment of their faith to Egypt. They were
bringing their ideas. As part of his invasion force, Napoleon brought
dozens of scientists who spent their sojourn in Egypt conducting experiments to showcase the power of French ideas and prove the greatness of
French civilization. He even tried to bring local learned men on board and
appointed the renowned Egyptian scholar al-Jabarti to his grand council.
At the time, al-Jabarti was chair of astronomy at al-Azhar University, and
his intellectual curiosity led him to go see the public demonstrations carried out by the French scientists. He was both baffled and impressed.7
Power politics were also at play in this imperial scheme. By invading
Egypt, Napoleon hoped to land a blow on France's great imperial rival,
Britain. Napoleon's foreign minister, Talleyrand, a man so politically
slippery he would have left Machiavelli in the shade, correctly identified
Egypt as the weak link in Britain's route to India.8 If France controlled
Cairo, the British would be in trouble.
For Napoleon, the dream was even bigger. With Egypt in his grasp and
India in his sights, he could be the new Alexander the Great.
But the French did not account for Admiral Horatio Nelson. Under
his command, the British navy routed the French fleet at the Battle of
Aboukir Bay (also known as the Battle of the Nile) on August 1, 1798.
Further French defeats followed when Napoleon set off in the footsteps
of the Crusaders and headed for the Christian Holy Land, only for his
troops to be heavily defeated in the coastal city of Acre by the Ottomans
in the summer of 1799. To make matters worse, the British again routed
the French in Alexandria on March 21, 1801, a defeat that left them no
option but to flee for home.
Napoleon himself had long since fled. After the disaster at Acre, he left
his forces to it and set sail in the early hours of August 22, 1799, without a
word to anyone. His successor as head of the army, General Jean-Baptiste
Kléber, had no idea what was going on until it was too late. Needless to
say, he was not too pleased and called his former boss all the names of
the day.9
Yet even in failure, Napoleon was welcomed home as a conquering
hero. In November that year, he was made First Consul. He was not yet
30 years old and all France was his. Defeat had done nothing to diminish
his reputation because there was something about the East that brought
out the crusading spirit among Europe's elites. This attitude fostered a
sense of entitlement, almost of ownership, so that when France occupied
Algeria a few decades after Napoleon's misadventure on the Nile, the idea
of colonizing the country was not as alien as it might first appear. As far
as the French political elite were concerned, General Bugeaud was pushing at an open door.
The colonization of Algeria was an old-fashioned land-grab. In 1840,
before he was deployed to Algeria, General Bugeaud told the National
Assembly in Paris what he intended to do when he arrived in Africa.
"Wherever there is fresh water and fertile land, we have to put settlers
without concerning ourselves as to whom these lands belong."10
He was true to his word. In the 1840s, the general and his forces wasted
no time clearing people off their land to make room for the soon-to-arrive
French. Once the link between the locals and the land was broken, the
farming industry fell apart and famine spread.11 People were forced to
migrate to the cities to look for work and feed their families. Their sense of
dislocation was enormous. Their sense of resentment was even greater.
It was not just the land of ordinary farmers that the French seized.
Tribal lands were also confiscated. Even religious lands were not safe.
Under Islamic law, land and property can be set aside as an endowment
(waqf ) to support charitable causes. The revenues from these lands are
used to support ventures such as mosques, religious schools, hospitals,
and so on. By providing social services to people who could not otherwise
afford them, religious lands functioned as a form of a welfare system.
In 1843, the French changed the law. Religious lands were now no different from any other form of land. Anyone could buy them. Even foreigners. The change had devastating consequences for Algerians. Not
only did it show the French had no respect for their Islamic way of life. It
destroyed the system many Algerians relied on to educate their children
and look after them when they were ill.12
The French were only getting started. After their victory against
Abd al-Qadir in 1847, they set about bringing the rest of Algeria under
their control. Throughout the 1850s, they extended their rule south into
the Sahara. This period of conquest and consolidation coincided with
the Second Empire (1852–70) of Louis-Napoleon in France. Nephew
of the first Napoleon, Louis was elected president of the Second Republic
in December 1848. Like his uncle, his ambition knew no limits, and in
December 1851, he staged a coup that laid the groundwork for him to
become Emperor Napoleon III a year later.
His Second Empire was an exciting era of excess where nothing seemed
off limits and anything seemed possible. Paris itself was torn apart in an
urban planning project of truly epic proportions. Whole districts were
destroyed to make way for Baron Haussmann's city of wide boulevards
and elegant design that we know today. (The redesign was not just done
for aesthetic reasons. It was also to facilitate the quick movement of troops
around the city so that there would be no repeat of the Commune and
the barricades of 1848.) The building industry boomed and speculation
in land reached fever pitch. Fortunes were made and lost in a day. The
wealth sloshing around the city from the new class of property millionaires and financiers fed an industry of arts, entertainment, and leisure.
Paris as a city of pleasure was born.
And when all the land that could be bought and sold in Paris had been
bought and sold, France's new class of speculators needed new markets
to exploit. Thanks to the land-clearing efforts of General Bugeaud, they
found them in Algeria. This was France's Gold Rush. Speculating in
Algeria (and later in other French colonies across North Africa) became
such common practice for French financiers that it seeped into the popular culture of the time. From the works of Balzac to Maupassant to Zola,
many of the classic novels of this period feature a character made or
ruined by a land deal in North Africa.
That land needed settlers. Algeria became a new frontier for France
where ambitious young men could go, like the Crusaders of old, to carve
out a new life and make something of themselves. By 1870, there were
nearly a quarter of a million Europeans living in Algeria. The result was
that Algeria split in two. One Algeria was for the French settlers, the
colons, who had access to the most productive land and who enjoyed the
full support of the French state. The other was for the Algerians themselves who were increasingly pushed to the margins of their own society
and who had no such legal protection.
These divisions were reinforced by language and law. The French spoke
their own language and made it compulsory for any Algerians wishing to
work in the public administration to do so too. Educated Algerians now
started to lead a double life. During the working day, they spoke French,
dressed in European clothes, and accommodated themselves to the
French way of doing things. At home in the evenings, they dropped the
mask and lived another life, speaking Arabic, wearing their own clothes,
and behaving the way they always had.
Then suddenly, in 1870, disaster struck the Second Empire. The
Franco-Prussian war that summer revealed the fragile reality behind the
glittering facade of Louis-Napoleon's empire. The French were routed.
The Germans were better equipped, better trained, better prepared
than the French, and in one battle alone, they inflicted 20,000 fatalities
on French forces. For France, the war was a national humiliation. The
resource-rich province of Alsace-Lorraine was lost. The Second Empire
collapsed. Louis-Napoleon went into exile in England.
For the Algerians, the end of empire was an opportunity to rebel.
A tribal leader named al-Muqrani stepped forward to lead his fellow
Algerians against the French. Large parts of Algeria rose up with him.13
But it was no use. France under the Third Republic was every bit as imperial as it had been under Napoleon III, and the Algerians were still no
match for the French forces. Colonization continued.
A few years later, in 1874, the French reinforced their authority over
the locals and their land through the code de l'indigénat. Under this law,
Algerian Muslims were subject to all manner of restrictions that did not
apply to the French settlers. The law's purpose was to curtail opposition to
French rule. As any activity from reading a newspaper critical of French
rule to a full-scale assault on French forces was considered opposition,
the law's remit was wide indeed. For Algerians to gain more rights, they
had to give up who they were. They had to renounce Islam (an offence
punishable by death under Islamic law) and renounce Algeria. They had
to become French. Few did.14
With Algerians out of the equation, the real power struggle in the
country was among the French themselves: the settlers and the army.
Each party had very different views for the future of Algeria. The settlers
wanted Algeria to be part of France. The army wanted it to be a separate
entity run by them through the bureaux arabes.
Ultimately, the settlers won. And their settler state was so successful
that it attracted large numbers of Spanish immigrants as well as those
from France. By the end of the nineteenth century, nearly two million
hectares of agricultural land were in their hands. They enjoyed so much
support in political, business, and financial circles in Paris that the army
was obliged to give in and accept Algeria as a département of metropolitan France with representation in the Chamber of Deputies.15
But there was one issue that neither the settlers nor their supporters
ever considered. What would happen if, one day, the Algerians launched a
rebellion the French military could not put down? By digging themselves
so deeply into land that was not theirs, the French were ensuring that if
such a revolt ever occurred, they could not simply cut and run, as the
British could—and would—do in Egypt. The French would be obliged to
risk everything and fight to the finish. Whatever the cost.
As the nineteenth century progressed, France's influence in the Arab
world extended far beyond Algeria.
In one area, modern-day Lebanon, French influence owed less to the
military might of bayonets and gunboats than to an unlikely combination
of schools and silkworms.
Mountainous and far from any center of power, Lebanon had long
been a haven for minorities fleeing persecution. As a result, modernday Lebanon, especially the area around Mount Lebanon, has a large
Christian population. And during the nineteenth century, Christian
minorities in the Muslim Ottoman Empire looked increasingly to
Europe for political protection. With European power on the rise and
the Ottoman Empire in dire need of European financial help, sultans had
little choice but to step aside and allow European capitals to all but adopt
a minority religious group.
Standing up for their co-religionists in the Ottoman Empire was a
policy European leaders could sell easily at home. In reality, however,
the policy was little more than cover for European powers to meddle
in Ottoman affairs. In Lebanon, Christians were mostly Maronite and
affiliated to the Catholic Church. As such, they looked to France as the
most powerful Catholic country to defend their interests. And France,
regardless of the Revolution's separation of Church and State, was only
too happy to oblige.
As a result, the shock troops of the French advance into Lebanon were
not troops, as was the case in Algeria, but Jesuit priests. In 1853, they set
up a printing press in Beirut to produce copies of the Bible in Arabic.
They also set about establishing schools that operated outside the official
Ottoman system.16 Often these schools were established in response to
the requests of local families. There were many areas where no schools
existed or, if they did, they concentrated on Quran studies and only
taught boys.
These Christian missionary schools became very successful, attracting competition from Protestant missionaries whose schools would prove
equally successful, but they helped create a two-tier education system
with knock-on social effects. In the privately run foreign missionary
schools, children were taught in French or English by French or English
teachers who often knew little or nothing about the Arab world. And just
as workers in the French-run administration in Algeria learnt to act one
way at work and another at home, students in these schools had to do the
same, but from an earlier age. Europeans, whether they arrived in the
Arab world as an invasion force or on a spiritual mission, brought profound cultural changes to the region and disrupted its long-established
social fabric.
The Europeans were also revolutionizing local economies. In Egypt,
agricultural output was overly concentrated on cotton production for
the European market. In Lebanon, agriculture was also heavily weighted
in one direction: silkworms for the French textile industry. Whole areas
were given over to the production of this one crop. The French textile
industry had powerful connections in Paris, and the relationship between
Lebanese silk farmers and French clothing manufacturers strengthened
French involvement in the region. As a result, the authorities in Paris
increasingly came to view this corner of the Ottoman Empire as part of
France's sphere of influence.17
Consequently, the French were quick to act when sectarian tensions led
to a massacre of Christians in Lebanon in 1860. As many as 11,000 men,
women, and children were killed, and well over a hundred Christian villages destroyed. The communal conflict between Christians and Druzes
stretched back decades and was littered with tit-for-tat killings, but it had
worsened in the recent past because the Ottomans played on it in an effort
to divide and conquer. France and Britain hurriedly sent gunboats to the
Lebanese coast and threatened to invade if the Ottoman authorities did
not resolve the crisis.18
To make sure a massacre on this scale did not happen again, the French
and British called for Mount Lebanon to become autonomous. Because
Istanbul had debts to both countries from the Crimean War, the sultan
gave way to their demands, and in 1861 the mountain became virtually
independent of Ottoman rule. It had its own Christian governor, paid
no taxes to Istanbul, and turned toward Europe. Its fortunes flourished.
There was no need for the French to force their way into this part of the
Arab world. Here, they were warmly welcomed.
Elsewhere in the Arab world where the population was not Christian,
the French were not welcomed quite so warmly.
Tunisia was one such place.
In the 1860s, Tunisia suffered much the same fate as its North African
neighbor Egypt. Like Egypt, Tunisia was nominally part of the Ottoman
Empire. Like Egypt, Tunisia was ruled by a local dynasty. And like Egypt,
that dynasty—the Husayni family—borrowed from European banks and
spent money it did not have. Years of bad harvests and plagues did the
rest and forced the country into bankruptcy in 1867. A debt commission
made up of British, French, and Italian representatives was set up in 1869
to sort out Tunisia's finances.
All of that changed in 1878 at the Congress of Berlin. Convened by
German Chancellor Prince Otto von Bismarck to sort out problems in the
Balkans, the congress of Europe's elites agreed to give France complete
control of Tunisia as compensation for France's loss of the coal-rich province of Alsace-Lorraine during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1.
What happened in Berlin set a dangerous precedent, which would bear
full fruit after the First World War and the effects of which are still with
us today in the battlefields of Syria, the carnage in the streets of Iraq, and
the instability in Lebanon. At the Congress of Berlin, European leaders
showed that harmony in their own continent came through the sacrifices made by the people of another. For Europe to live at peace, France
and Germany had to get along. If giving France control of a country on
another continent assuaged French pride and made Franco-German
cooperation easier, it was a price worth paying. Except that it was not a
price being paid by anyone in Europe.
In Tunisia, the French pursued a less-obviously-aggressive policy
than they did in Algeria. There was no attempt to turn Tunisia into a settler state or a military colony. Even so, Tunisians were still separated by
language and law from the French. They were still second-class citizens
in their own country. They were still sidelined economically in favor of
French investors and immigrants. And they were no happier about it than
the Algerians were about what was happening in their country. But faced
with the economic, military, and technical superiority of a European
power, they were equally powerless to do anything to stop it.
With Algeria and Tunisia under their control, the French planned
to consolidate their control of North Africa by turning their attention
to Morocco. Morocco's position on the north-western Atlantic coast of
Africa had long helped preserve its independence from the Ottoman
Empire. At its political helm was a family, the Alawis, who claimed
descent from the Prophet Muhammad. They had ruled the province
for centuries, from the 1600s, and their grip on power seemed secure
until Sultan Hasan (r. 1873–95) made the same mistake as his counterparts along the coast and borrowed excessively from European banks to
fund modernization. In fairness to him, and to them, the structure of
the global economy at the time left them with little alternative. If they
wished to modernize, they had to borrow to buy the latest technology.
And the only people they could borrow such large sums from were the
European banks.
In 1899, the French moved in.
They faced opposition not just from the Moroccans but from the
Spanish. Since 1580, the Mediterranean port of Ceuta had been Spain's
even though it was on Moroccan territory. The nearby city of Melilla
also belonged to Spain. As a result, Spain felt Morocco fell within Spain's
sphere of influence. The dispute was eventually settled thanks to France's
increasingly friendly relations with her great imperial rival, Britain.
In April 1904, Britain and France signed the Entente Cordiale. This
treaty formalized their relations by continuing the process begun at
the Congress of Berlin of carving up various parts of the world to suit
European imperial interests. In this case, France recognized Britain's
complete control of Egypt and Britain recognized France's complete control of Morocco. As was the case with Tunisia at the Congress of Berlin,
the Entente took no account of the wishes of Egyptians or Moroccans.
Morocco's fate was settled at a conference of European powers at
Algeciras in southern Spain in January 1906. France, backed by Britain,
was allowed to take the bulk of Morocco while the Spanish kept their
ports in the north.
In Morocco itself, the French ruled with much the same mix of conquest and colonization as they did elsewhere in North Africa. The sultan
became little more than a figurehead, while the power behind the throne
was the Resident-General, a French military man, Marshal Lyautey.
Under his command, lands belonging to the sultan and the tribes were
seized and made available for French settlers. And the French authorities
continued their relentless quest to convert the Muslim middle classes to
their way of life through the power of the French language and the allure
of French culture.
The conference at Algeciras was evidence of the Entente Cordiale
in action and showed what the British and the French could achieve in
pursuit of their interests when they presented a united front. Less than
a decade later, that Entente would take them into war on the same side.
Fighting alongside them in that war were the Russians. And they, too,
had interests and ambitions in the Arab world. Since the Ottoman conquest of Christian Constantinople on May 29, 1453, the Russian rulers had considered themselves the new Caesars and Russia as the New
Rome. The Russians were just waiting for the right moment to seize
their destiny.
The Russian Empire
and the Arab World:
Religion, Royalty, and
the New Rome
In the summer of 1907, Britain and Russia signed a cooperation treaty.
The driving force behind it was much the same as the driving force
behind the Entente Cordiale between Britain and France three years earlier: the need for each empire to recognize—and stay out of—the other's
sphere of influence.
In the corridors of power in London, Russia's recent intervention
in northern Persia and Afghanistan had set alarm bells ringing. These
regions were perilously close to India. And Britain, obsessive as ever
about securing all routes to the subcontinent, wanted to keep Russia out.
For London, a treaty was cheaper than a war. In Russia, defeat abroad
(the war with Japan in 1904–5) and political instability at home (the
revolution of 1905) led to a reassessment of the country's strategic objectives. Pragmatism won out. For St. Petersburg, too, a treaty was cheaper
than a war.
Yet there was more than politics to the Anglo-Russian relationship.
These two empires were family. Edward VII of England was related to
Russia's Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, the tsarina, by marriage and blood.
To understand just how interrelated the royal houses of England and
Russia were, a quick detour through Denmark is needed.
It was thanks to Edward VII's Danish wife that he was the tsar's
uncle. Edward VII (r. 1901–10) was married to the beautiful Danish
princess, Alexandra, whose equally beautiful younger sister, Dagmar,
was married to Russia's Alexander III (r. 1881–94). Their son and heir
was Tsar Nicholas II (r. 1894–1917).
But it was thanks to Edward VII's own family that he was the tsarina's
uncle. Tsar Nicholas II's wife was Alix of Hesse, the daughter of a German
duke. However, when Nicholas married her, he married into more than
German royalty. He married into the British imperial family. Because Alix
was none other than Queen Victoria's granddaughter, as Alix's mother
was Victoria's daughter, Princess Alice.
And if Edward's nephew-by-marriage marrying his niece-by-blood
is not confusing enough, the long-term effects of these interdynastic
marriages ripple to this day. The small Danish royal house continued
to punch well above their weight, matrimonially speaking. Alexandra
and Dagmar's brother, Prince William, later to become King George I
of Greece, married a Russian princess named Olga, and their grandson,
Philip, would later marry Britain's future Queen Elizabeth II.
As for Alix herself, she was no ordinary member of Britain's first family. She was Queen Victoria's favorite grandchild. Alix's mother died when
Alix was very young and the queen took a close interest in her granddaughter's upbringing. As a young adult, when Alix met and fell madly in
love with the future tsar, her grandmother was less than thrilled. Victoria
was worried—rightly, as it turned out—that Russia's thr