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Importing Modernity: European Military Missions to Qajar Iran

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 January 2008

Stephanie Cronin
Stephanie Cronin
Affiliation:
Iran Heritage Foundation Fellow, University of Northampton
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Extract

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, when the Middle East and North Africa first began to attract the sustained attention of European imperialism and colonialism, Arab, Ottoman Turkish, and Iranian polities began a protracted experiment with army modernization. These decades saw a mania in the Middle East for the import of European methods of military organization and techniques of warfare. Everywhere, in the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, Egypt, and Iran, nizam-i jadid (new order) regiments sprang up, sometimes on the ruins of older military formations, sometimes alongside them, unleashing a process of military-led modernization that was to characterize state-building projects throughout the region until well into the twentieth century. The ruling dynasties in these regions embarked on army reform in a desperate effort to strengthen their defensive capacity, and to resist growing European hegemony and direct or indirect control by imitating European methods of military organization and warfare. Almost every indigenous ruler who succeeded in evading or warding off direct European control, from the sultans of pre-Protectorate Morocco in the west to the shahs of the Qajar dynasty in Iran in the east, invited European officers, sometimes as individuals, sometimes as formal missions, to assist with building a modern army. With the help of these officers, Middle Eastern rulers thus sought to appropriate the secrets of European power.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , January 2008 , pp. 197 - 226
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History 2008

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References

1 Where countries fell under direct European control, the process of military modernization and state-building took place within a totally different configuration.

2 Although the role of military reform in generating a dynamic for a wider state-building agenda has long been acknowledged, studies of the new armies of the nineteenth-century Middle East and North Africa are few. Among the most important are Stanford Shaw, J., “The Origins of Ottoman Military Reform: The Nizam-i Cedid Army of Sultan Selim III,” Journal of Modern History 37, 3 (1965): 291–305CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brown, L. Carl, The Tunisia of Ahmed Bey (Princeton, 1974)Google Scholar; Yapp, M. E., “The Modernization of Middle Eastern Armies in the Nineteenth Century: A Comparative View,” in, Yapp, M. E. and Parry, V. J., eds., War, Technology and Society in the Middle East (London, 1975)Google Scholar; Rollman, Wilfrid J., “The ‘New Order’ in a Pre-Colonial Muslim Society: Military Reform in Morocco, 1844–1904,” Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1983Google Scholar; Fahmy, Khaled, All the Pasha's Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army and the Making of Modern Egypt (Cambridge, 1997)Google Scholar. Recent attention has turned from the reforming westernizing elites to military modernization as experienced “from below.” See Fahmy, All the Pasha's Men; Zürcher, Erik J., ed., Arming the State: Military Conscription in the Middle East and Central Asia (London and New York, 1999)Google Scholar; Moreau, Odile and el Moudden, Abderrahmane, eds., “Réforme par le haut, réforme par le bas: La modernisation de L'armée aux 19e et 20e siècles,” Quaderni di Oriente Moderno (special issue) (Rome, 2004)Google Scholar. Surprisingly, in the light of the amount of material, memoirs, and diplomatic correspondence they generated, the European missions have attracted little interest. Two articles look at the German missions to the Ottoman Empire: Trumpener, Ulrich, “Liman von Sanders and the German-Ottoman Alliance,” Journal of Contemporary History 1, 4 (Oct. 1966): 179–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Swanson, Glen W., “War, Technology and Society in the Ottoman Empire from the Reign of Abdülhamid II to 1913: Mahmud Şevket and the German Military Mission,” in, Yapp, M. E. and V. J. Parry, , eds., War, Technology and Society in the Middle East (London, 1975), 366–85Google Scholar. Pre-colonial Morocco is the subject of Khalid Ben Srhir's “Britain and Military Reforms in Morocco during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” in, Odile Moreau and Abderrahmane el Moudden, eds., “Réforme par le haut, réforme par le bas: La modernisation de L'armée aux 19e et 20e siècles,” Quaderni di Oriente Moderno (special issue) (Rome, 2004): 85–109. Morocco's interesting experiment with an Ottoman mission is dealt with by el Moudden, Abderrahmane, “Looking Eastward: Some Moroccan Tentative Military Reforms with Turkish Assistance (18th–early 20th Centuries),” Maghreb Review 19, 3–4 (1994): 237–45Google Scholar. Iran has suffered a particular lack of scholarly interest in this topic. There is no comprehensive study of the military or military reform in nineteenth-century Iran. For an overview, see Calmard, J., “Les Réformes Militaires sous les Qajars (1795–1925),” in, Richard, Y., ed., Entre l'Iran et l'Occident (Paris, 1989), 17–42Google Scholar. A small number of older Persian works also provide surveys. See Qa'im-Maqami, Jahangir, Tahavvulat-i Siyasi-yi Nizam-i Iran (Tehran, 1326)Google Scholar; Quzanlu, Jamil, Tarikh-i Nizam-i Iran, 2 vols. (Tehran, 1315)Google Scholar. The late Nasir-al-Din Shah decades are dealt with by Tousi, Reza Ra'iss, “The Persian Army, 1880–1907,” Middle Eastern Studies 24, 2 (Apr. 1988): 206–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The individual military forces of the late Qajar and constitutional periods have fared better (see The Cossack Brigade, the Government gendarmerie, and the South Persia Rifles, below). The only foreign mission to have received serious attention is the Swedish mission of the constitutional period. See Ineichen, Markus, Die Schwedischen Offiziere in Persien 1911–1916 (Bern, 2002)Google Scholar. The present article is the first to examine the foreign military missions to Iran as a general phenomenon.

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4 The Safavids claimed descent from the seventh Imam and had ruled an empire that at its height stretched from Baghdad to Herat.

5 Riza Shah, like his contemporary Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, conceptualized the state-building project in terms of consolidating these borders, not as an irredentist challenge.

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16 In the Ottoman Empire and Egypt, the reform effort could only begin in earnest after the destruction of reactionary military castes, the Janissaries and the Mamluks, respectively. In Iran no such forces existed. This indicates not Iran's relatively advanced condition, but rather its primitive civil and military structures.

17 The presence of such a significant number of Russian deserters in Tabriz may be explained by the extremely harsh conditions prevailing in the Russian armies in the Caucasus. See Atkin, Russia and Iran, 106–7.

18 Morier, A Second Journey through Persia, 211–12.

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30 For the circumstances of Amir Kabir's fall, see Amanat, Pivot of the Universe, 133–68.

31 For a discussion of the Italian interest in Iranian military reform, see Piemontese, A., “An Italian Source for the History of Qāğār Persia: The Reports of the General Enrico Andreini (1871–1886),” East and West 19 (1969): 147–75Google Scholar; “L'esercito persiano nel 1874–75. Organizzazione e riforma secondo E. Andreini,” Rivista degli Studi Orientali 49 (1975): 71–117.

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33 This policy held sway between 1830 and 1870 and concentrated on consolidation in India and a static defense of the Empire.

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37 Picot, Report on the Organization of the Persian Army, Durand to Salisbury, 18 Jan. 1900, FO881/7364,105.

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42 In the early twentieth century, oil joined Britain's older commercial and strategic interests in the area.

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46 The Agreement was named after the prime minister, Muhammad Vali Khan Sipahsalar, with whom it was drawn up.

47 Marling to FO, 21 Dec. 1917, FO371/2988/242011; Consul, Tabriz, to Marling, 20 Feb. 1918, FO371/3264/33414.

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55 See Katouzian, Homa, State and Society in Iran: The Eclipse of the Qajars and the Emergence of the Pahlavis (London and New York, 2000)Google Scholar, chs. 4, 5.

56 See, for example, the scheme outlined by the prime minister, Ala al-Saltanah, in July 1917. Memorandum from Ala-us-Saltaneh [sic] to Marling, 30 July 1917, FO371/2981/200656.

57 For wider background on the British and the coup, see especially Cronin, Stephanie, “Britain, the Iranian Military and the Rise of Riza Khan,” in, Martin, Vanessa, ed., Anglo-Iranian Relations since 1900 (London, 2005), 99–127Google Scholar.

58 Norman to Curzon, 6 June 1921, FO371/6406/E9970/2/34.

59 See Tancoigne, A Narrative of a Journey into Persia, 245–49.

60 After 1941 U.S. missions came fast and furious. See Ricks, Thomas M., “U.S. Military Missions to Iran, 1943–1978: The Political Economy of Military Assistance,” Iranian Studies 12, 3–4 (1979): 163–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.