The Crimean War полностью

In 1838, through a series of military threats and promises, Britain imposed on the Porte a Tariff Convention which in effect transformed the Ottoman Empire into a virtual free-trade zone. Deprived of tariff revenues, the Porte’s ability to protect its nascent industries was seriously handicapped. From this moment the export of British manufactured goods to Turkey rose steeply. There was an elevenfold increase by 1850, making it one of Britain’s most valuable export markets (surpassed only by the Hanseatic towns and the Netherlands). After the repeal of the protectionist Corn Laws in 1846, British imports of cereals from Turkey, chiefly from Moldavia and Wallachia, increased as well. The advent of ocean steamships, steam river-boats and railroads opened up the Danube for the first time as a busy commercial highway. The river’s trade was dominated by British merchant ships exporting grain to western Europe and importing manufactures from Britain. The British were in direct competition with the merchants of Odessa, Taganrog and other Black Sea ports, from which the grain of Russia’s breadbasket in the Ukraine and south Russia was exported to the West. The cereal export market was increasingly important to Russia as the value of its timber trade declined during the steam age. By the middle of the nineteenth century the Black Sea ports were handling one-third of all Russian exports. The Russians tried to give their traders an advantage over their British rivals through their control of the Danube delta after 1829 by subjecting foreign ships to time-consuming quarantine controls and even allowing the Danube to silt up and become once more unnavigable.

On the eastern side of the Black Sea the commercial interests of Britain were increasingly bound up with the port of Trebizond, in north-eastern Turkey, from which Greek and Armenian merchants imported large quantities of British manufactured goods for sale in the interior of Asia. The growing value of this trade to Britain, observed Karl Marx in the New York Tribune, ‘may be seen at the Manchester Exchange, where dark-complexioned Greek buyers are increasing in numbers and importance, and where Greek and South Slav dialects are heard along with German and English’. Until the 1840s, the Russians had a near-monopoly of trade in manufactured goods in this part of Asia. Russian textiles, rope and linen products dominated the bazaars of Bayburt, Baghdad and Basra. But steamships and railways made it possible to open up a shorter route to India – either through the Mediterranean to Cairo and then from Suez to the Red Sea, or via the Black Sea to Trebizond and the Euphrates river to the Persian Gulf (sailing ships could not readily cope with the high winds and monsoons of the Gulf of Suez or with the narrow waters of the Euphrates). The British favoured the Euphrates route, mainly because it ran through territories ruled by the Sultan (as opposed to Mehmet Ali); developing the route was seen as a way to increase British influence and check the growing power of Russia in this part of the Ottoman Empire. In 1834 Britain received permission from the Porte for General Francis Chesney to survey the Euphrates route. The survey was a failure, and British interest in the route declined. But plans for a Euphrates Valley Railway from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf via Aleppo and Baghdad were revived in the 1850s, when the British government was looking for a way to increase its presence in an area where they perceived a growing Russian threat to India (the railway was never developed by the British, for lack of financial guarantees, but the Baghdad Railway built by Germany from 1903 followed much of the same route).

The danger Russia posed to India was the bête noire of British Russophobes. For some, this would become the underlying aim of the Crimean War: to stop a power bent not just on the conquest of Turkey but on the domination of the whole of Asia Minor right up to Afghanistan and India. In their alarmed imagination there were no bounds on the designs of Russia, the fastest growing empire in the world.