The French statesman François Guizot maintained that the 1833 treaty had converted the Black Sea into a ‘Russian lake’ guarded by Turkey, the Tsar’s ‘vassal state’, ‘without anything hindering Russia herself from passing through the Straits and hurling her ships and soldiers into the Mediterranean’. The chargé d’affaires in St Petersburg lodged a protest with the Russian government warning that if the treaty led to Russia intervening in ‘the internal affairs of the Ottoman Empire, the French government would hold itself wholly at liberty to adopt such a line of conduct as circumstances might suggest’. Palmerston empowered Ponsonby to summon the British fleet from the Mediterranean for the defence of Constantinople, if he felt that it was threatened by Russia.27
The events of 1833 were a turning point in British policy towards Russia and Turkey. Until then, Britain’s main concern in the Ottoman Empire had been to preserve the status quo, mainly from fears that its breakup would affect the balance of power in Europe and possibly lead to a European war, rather than from any firm commitment to the sovereignty of the Sultan (their support for Greece had not demonstrated much of that). But once the British woke up to the danger that the Ottoman Empire might be taken over by the Egyptians at the head of a powerful Muslim revival, or, even worse, that it might become a Russian protectorate, they took an active interest in Turkey. They increasingly intervened in Ottoman affairs, encouraging economic and political reforms by which the British hoped to restore the health of the Ottoman Empire and expand their influence.
Britain’s interests were mainly commercial. The Ottoman Empire was a growing market for the export of British manufactures and a valuable source of raw materials. As the dominant industrial power in the world, Britain generally threw its weight behind the opening up of global markets to free trade; as the dominant naval power, it was prepared to use its fleet to force foreign governments to open up their markets. This was a type of ‘informal empire’, an ‘imperialism of free trade’, in which Britain’s military power and political influence advanced its commercial hegemony and curtailed the independence of foreign governments without the direct controls of imperial rule.
Nowhere was this more in evidence than in the Ottoman Empire. Ponsonby was at pains to stress the economic dividends of increased British influence in Constantinople. ‘Protection given to our political interests’, the ambassador wrote to Palmerston in 1834, ‘will throw open sources of commercial prosperity perhaps hardly to be hoped for from our intercourse with any other country upon earth.’ By this time there was a large and powerful body of British traders with extensive interests in Turkey who put growing pressure on the government to intervene. Their viewpoint was expressed in influential periodicals, such as
