British foreign policy in the Middle East has involved multiple considerations, particularly over the last two and a half centuries. These included maintaining access to British India, blocking Russian or French threats to that access, protecting the Suez Canal, supporting the declining Ottoman Empire against Russian threats, guaranteeing an oil supply after 1900 from Middle East fields, protecting Egypt and other possessions in the Middle East, and enforcing Britain's naval role in the Mediterranean. The timeframe of major concern stretches from the 1770s when the Russian Empire began to dominate the Black Sea, down to the Suez Crisis of the mid-20th century and involvement in the Iraq War in the early 21st. These policies are an integral part of the history of the foreign relations of the United Kingdom.
Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815)
Prior to 1798, British interests after the end of the Crusader states of Outremer in the Near East were limited to commercial interests like the Elizabethan Levant Company, and tangential matters in foreign policy: for example, in 1737 Britain had attempted to negotiate with Russia over the fate of the fortresses of the Caucasus in a bid to secure Russian support for Britain's ally Austria in general European policy during their war of 1737–39 with the Ottomans.Simms, Brendan Three Victories and a Defeat The Royal Navy had been involved in policing the sea lanes to the Barbary Coast to prevent raids by Arab and Berber slavers on European and British shores (of which the peak was around 1625-27 when the raids extended into Cornwall and even as far north as Iceland), but these were limited by lack of suitable bases (Tangier fell to Morocco shortly after its cession by Portugal to Britain, and Gibraltar from 1704 was limited).
Napoleon Bonaparte, the antagonist of the French wars against Britain from the late 1790s until 1815, used the French fleet to convey a large invasion army to Egypt, a major province of the Ottoman Empire. British commercial interests represented by the Levant Company had a successful base in Egypt, and indeed the company handled all Egypt's local diplomacy. The British Royal Navy under Admiral Horatio Nelson responded and sank the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile in 1798, thereby trapping Napoleon's army in Egypt.Piers Mackesy, British Victory in Egypt, 1801: The End of Napoleon's Conquest (1995). Napoleon escaped. The army he left behind was decimated by disease and defeated by the British and Ottoman forces at the Battle of Acre in 1801 and the survivors returned to France. In 1807 when Britain was at war with the Ottomans, the British sent a further force to Alexandria, but it was defeated by the Egyptians under Mohammed Ali Pasha, who had seized power in 1805. After this defeat the British forces withdrew.
The Near East was a source of little concern for Great Britain after Napoleon's defeat in 1814–15, excepting attempted Russian penetration into Ottoman Turkey and Persia. Britain absorbed the Levant Company's services into the Foreign Office by 1825.M.S. Anderson, The Eastern Question: 1774-1923, (1966) pp 24-33, 39-40.J.A.R. Marriott, The Eastern Question (1940) pp 165-83.
Ottoman weakening (1815-1853)
Europe was generally peaceful from 1815, and the Greeks’ long war of independence was the major military conflict in the 1820s.Macfie, pp 14-19; Anderson, pp 53-87. Serbia had gained its autonomy from Ottoman Empire in 1815. The Greek Revolution came next starting in 1821, with a rebellion indirectly sponsored by Russia. The Greeks had strong intellectual and business communities which employed propaganda echoing the French Revolution and contemporaneous Latin American revolutions that appealed to the popular romanticism of Western Europe. Despite harsh Ottoman reprisals like the Massacre of Chios in 1822, they kept their rebellion alive.
British policy of non-intervention reflected the opinion of the major architect of the Congress of Vienna peace, Klemens Wenzel von Metternich, Austria's prime minister from 1809 to 1848. At the Congress he had insisted on leaving Ottoman affairs outside the scope of the conference, and in fact he then sardonically asked if a British intervention in Greece gave the Austrian Empire the right to intervene in Ireland.Mazowrt, Mark The Greek Revolution Public opinion was different, and sympathisers like Lord Byron played a major role in shaping British public opinion to strongly favor the Greeks, especially among romantics, Radicals, the Whig Opposition, and the Evangelicals.Robert Zegger, "Greek Independence and the London committee," History Today (1970) 20#4 pp 236-245. However, the top British foreign policy makers George Canning (whose brother Stratford Canning later became ambassador to Constantinople) and Viscount Castlereagh were much more cautious. British policy down to 1914 was to preserve the declining Ottoman Empire, especially against hostile pressures from Russia. However, when Ottoman behavior was outrageously oppressive against Christians, London demanded reforms and concessions.Kenneth Bourne, The foreign Policy of Victorian England 1830-1902 (1970) p. 19.Rich. Great Power Diplomacy: 1814–1914 (1992) pp. 44–57.Allan Cunningham, "The philhellenes, Canning and Greek independence." Middle Eastern Studies 14.2 (1978): 151-181.
The context of the three Great Powers' intervention was Russia's long-running expansion at the expense of the decaying Ottoman Empire. However, Russia's ambitions in the region were seen as a major geostrategic threat by the other European powers. Austria feared the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire would destabilize its southern borders. Russia's Tsar Alexander I, a big proponent of Orthodox mysticism, gave strong emotional support for the fellow Orthodox Christian Greeks. The French too were motivated by strong public support for the Greeks. The government in London paid special attention to the powerful role of the Royal Navy throughout the entire Mediterranean region, where Britain had gained Malta and the Ionian Islands as protectorates during the Napoleonic Wars. First limited to loans from banks negotiated by unaccredited, unofficial Greek diplomats in 1823, British action expanded fearing unilateral Russian action after Tsar Nicholas I acceding to the throne in support of the Greeks. Britain and France bound Russia by treaty to a joint intervention which aimed to secure Greek autonomy whilst preserving Ottoman territorial integrity as a check on Russia.Henry Kissinger. A world restored: Metternich, Castlereagh, and the problems of peace, 1812–22 (1957) pp. 295–311.
The Powers agreed, by the Treaty of London (1827), to force the Ottoman government to grant the Greeks autonomy within the empire and despatched naval squadrons to Greece to enforce their policy.Paul Hayes, Modern British Foreign Policy: The nineteenth century, 1814–80 (1975) pp. 155–73. The decisive Allied naval victory at the Battle of Navarino broke the military power of the Ottomans and their Egyptian allies. Victory saved the fledgling Greek Republic from collapse- from 1825 the force led by Mohammed Ali of Egypt's son on behalf of Ottoman sultan Mahmud II had been on the verge of victory against the Greeks. But it required two more military interventions, by Russia in the form of the Russo-Turkish War of 1828–29 and by a French expeditionary force to the Peloponnese to force the withdrawal of Ottoman forces from central and southern Greece and to finally secure Greek independence.Douglas Dakin, Greek Struggle for Independence: 1821–1833 (U of California Press, 1973). Greek nationalists proclaimed a new "Great Idea" whereby the little nation of 800,000 would expand to include all the millions of Greek Orthodox believers in the region now under Ottoman control, with Constantinople to be reclaimed as its capital. This idea was the antithesis of the British goal of maintaining the Ottoman Empire, and London switched from support to systematically oppose the Greeks in the further expansion of the new nation-state as delineated in suitably conservative boundaries in 1832, which comprised only Attica, the Cyclades and the Peloponnese.Charles Jelavich and Barbara Jelavich, The establishment of the Balkan national states, 1804-1920 (1977) pp 76-83.
This would form a template for a British management of the Ottoman Empire's decline at the expense of Russia. The Russians reacted with renewed vigour in their dealings with the Ottoman Empire, attempting to bully their way into domination by pretexts of safeguarding the rights of Orthodox minorities in cases of diplomatic strongarming like the Treaty of Humkar Iselski in 1833. Similar moves had been made in the Caucasus when the Kingdom of Georgia had requested Russian protection in 1801, and on Persia following the Russian victories in the Russo-Persian Wars of 1813 and 1828, when the Treaty of Turkmenchay pushed Persia's borders beyond most of Azerbaijan, to where they are today. This built up a framework of Anglo-Russian competition for favour and influence amongst the polities of the Near East and Central Asia, dubbed the Great Game by Rudyard Kipling, that was to last into the 20th century.
It then alarmed the British to see the Egyptian pasha Muhammad Ali, whose influence had been growing since 1805 when he had effectively waged wars on behalf of the comparatively inactive Ottoman court of Constantinople in the Hejaz (against a Saudi and Wahabbist rebellion) and Greece, attempt to claim the mantle of Sultan for himself as he marched on Constantinople through Syria in the late 1830s, in outright rebellion against the Ottomans. Fearing the loss of their interests under a new rejuvenated ruler of the Ottoman Empire, a Quadruple Alliance of Great Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia intervened on behalf of the new Ottoman sultan Abdulmecid I in 1839–40, defeating Mohammed Ali's forces sufficiently to force him to accept a compromise that allowed him and his successors hereditary rule of a viceroyalty (khediviate) of the Ottoman Empire based in Egypt that was only de jure under Ottoman rule. France under the July Monarchy had recently conquered the Ottoman vassal of the Beylik of Algiers, and therefore backed Mohammed Ali, was thus forestalled a second time in her devious designs on Egypt when the French government backed down from its promises of military help to Egypt. The compromise with Mohammed Ali proved lasting, and with his death in 1849 the khediviate passed to his son, beginning a dynasty that ruled until 1952.
Revolutions in Diplomacy (1853-1878)