The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia by Peter Hopkirk - Chs. 3,4

Chapter 3: Rehearsal for the Great Game

• see Captain Charles Christie's Mission to Herat and Lieutenant Henry Pottinger's observations of Baluchistan and Kerman
• "Early in 1812, to the immense relief of London and Calcutta, the alarming partnership between Napoleon and Alexander had broken up. In June of that year Napoleon attacked, not India, but Russia, and to the astonishment of the world suffered the most catastrophic reverse in history. The threat to India had been lifted. Or so it seemed to a wildly rejoicing Britain." - 56

Chapter 4: The Russian Bogy

• March 30, 1814: "Alexander, convinced now that he had been ordained by the Almighty to rid the world of Napoleon, was not content simply to drive them back beyond his own frontiers. He pursued the French half-way across Europe to Paris, entering it in triumph" - 58
• "If one man could be said to be responsible for the creation of the Russian bogy, it was a much-decorated British general named Sir Robert Wilson....It was on his return [from Russia as the official British observer] to London that Wilson drew official wrath upon himself by launching a one-man campaign against the Russians." - 59
• 1817: Wilson publishes A Sketch of the Military and Political Power of Russia; "In it he claimed that the Russians, emboldened by their sudden rise to power, were planning to carry out Peter the Great's supposed death-bed command that they conquer the world." - 60
• "Although Wilson had no lack of supporters among the intelligentsia and the liberals, who abhorred Alexander's authoritarian rule, and from newspapers and journals of like view, he was largely shouted down. Nonetheless his book, much of which was based on false assumptions, gave birth to a debate on Russia's every move which would continue for a hundred years or more....The first seeds of Russophobia had been sown." - 61
• 1813: Treaty of Gulistan, "the Shah was obliged to surrender almost all his claims to Georgia and Baku, as well as renouncing all naval rights on the Caspian Sea....All that the Shah got in return, apart from an end to hostilities, was an undertaking from the Tsar that he would support the claim of Abbas Mirza, his son and heir apparent....the Shah had no intention of honouring this treaty which had been forced upon him by his aggressive neighbours" - 66

The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia by Peter Hopkirk - Ch.2

Chapter 2: Napoleonic Nightmare

• "There were two schools of thought. One argued that he would advance overland through Syria or Turkey, and attack India from Afghanistan or Baluchistan, while the other was convinced that he would come by sea, setting sail from somewhere on Egypt's Red Sea coast." - 24-5
• the East India Company "had found itself drawn reluctantly and expensively into the vacuum created by the disintegration of Mogul rule in India, and therefore increasingly involved in government and administration." - 25
• August 1, 1798: Admiral Horatio Nelson finds the French Armada of 40,000 soldiers east of Alexandria, Egypt, traps the fleet, and destroys all but two ships (26)
• January 24, 1801: after failing to convince Napoleon to join him, Tsar Paul I orders the Don Cossacks to attempt an overland invasion of India, through mainly unknown terrain; Paul told the Cossack leader, "You are to offer peace to all who are against the British....All the wealth of the Indies shall be your reward." - 28
• March 23, 1801: Tsar Paul I is assassinated and his son Alexander soon sends a messenger to stop the Don Cossacks - 29-30
• September 1801: Tsar Alexander annexes the independent kingdom of Georgia; "although Persian feelings ran high, actual hostilities did not break out between the two powers until June 1804, when the Russians thrust even further south, laying siege to Erivan, the capital of Armenia, a Christian possession of the Shah's." - 32
• "Early in 1804, informed of what happened [involving the British neglecting to assist Persia against Russian incursions]..., Napoleon approached the Shah, offering to help him drive back the Russians in return for the use of Persia as a land-bridge for a French invasion of India." - 33
• May 4, 1807: the Shah of Persia "signed a treaty with Napoleon...in which he agreed to sever all political and commercial relations with Britain, declare war on her, and allow French troops the right of passage" - 33
• "Fears of a Franco-Russian attack on India had brought home to those responsible for its defence how little they knew about the territories through which an invading army would have to march. Something had to be done quickly to remedy this, for all the treaties in the world would not stop a determined aggressor like Napoleon." - 36

The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia by Peter Hopkirk - Forward to Ch.1

Foreword

• "a succession of ambitious Tsars and ruthless generals crushed the Muslim peoples of Central Asia and occupied their lands. Fearing that the Russians would not stop until India too was theirs, the British sent young officers northwards through the passes to spy on them. At times the Great Game spilled over into Afghanistan, Persia, China and Tibet" - xv

Prologue

• 1807: "intelligence reached London which was to cause considerable alarm to both the British government and the [East India] Company's directors. Napoleon Bonaparte, emboldened by his run of brilliant victories in Europe, had put it to Paul's successor, Tsar Alexander I, that they should together invade India and wrest it from British domination" - 2-3
• "diplomatic missions were dispatched [by the British] to the Shah of Persia and the Emir of Afghanistan, through whose domains the aggressor [Russia] would have to pass, in the hope of discouraging them from entering into any liaisons with the foe." - 3
• "Indian hill men of exceptional intelligence and resource, specially trained in clandestine surveying techniques, were dispatched across the frontier disguised as Muslim holy men or Buddhist pilgrims. In this way, often at great risk to their lives, they secretly mapped thousands of square miles of previously unexplored terrain with remarkable accuracy. For their part, the Russians used Mongolian Buddhists to penetrate regions considered too dangerous for Europeans." - 5
• "The Afghans, Moscow found too late, were an unbeatable foe." - 7

Chapter 1: The Yellow Peril

• 1206: "The dreadful Mongol whirlwind had been unleashed on the world...by an illiterate military genius named Teumjin, formerly the unknown chief of a minority tribe, whose fame was destined shortly to eclipse even that of Alexander the Great. It was the dream of Genghis Khan, as he was to become known, to conquer the earth, a task which he believed he had been chosen by God to carry out. During the next thirty years, he and his successors almost achieved this. At the height of their power their empire was to stretch from the Pacific coast to the Polish frontier. It embraced the whole of China, Persia, Afghanistan, present-day Central Asia, and parts of northern India and the Caucasus. But more important still, and particularly to our narrative, it included vast tracts of Russia and Siberia." - 12
• "taking advantage of its reduced circumstances and military weakness, Russia's European neighbors began to help themselves freely to its territory. The German principalities, Lithuania, Poland and Sweden all joined in....Crushed thus between their European foes to the west and the Mongols to the east, the Russians were to develop a paranoid dread of invasion and encirclement which has bedeviled their foreign relations ever since." - 13
• "If Catherine [the Great] failed to add either India or Constantinople to her domains, she nonetheless took a number of steps in that direction. Not only did she win back from the Persians the Caucasian territories which Anne had restored to them, but she also took possession of the Crimea, that last surviving stronghold of the Mongol empire." - 21
• "To conquer India we must first make ourselves masters of Egypt." - 22, Napoleon Bonaparte

Empire of the Mind: A History of Iran by Michael Axworthy

Chapter 6: The Crisis of the Qajar Monarchy, the Revolution of 1905-1911, and the Accession of the Pahlavi Dynasty

• "Persian merchants began to protest the fact that cheap European products, especially textiles, were coming onto Persian markets with low or no tariffs and were undercutting domestic craftsmen, destroying their livelihoods. Predictably, the merchants who made a profit from handling the imports kept quiet." - 186
• "Another development during the reign of Mohammad Shah was the appearance in Iran of the Babi movement, which eventually gave rise to the Baha'i religion." - 187
• March 1857: The Peace of Paris "stipulated that Persia must abandon all claim to Afghan territory" -192
• "The British, feeling their loss of the latest round in the Great Game, decided in 1902/1903 to liaise with some members of the ulema, notably Ayatollah Abdollah Behbehani, to oppose the customs arrangements, including the Belgian administrators and the Russian loans....The following year the harvest was bad. Next, the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war, followed by the 1905 revolution in Russia, interrupted imports from the north and made them more expensive. The significance of the outcome of the war, in which the Japanese inflicted a humiliating defeat on the Russians (with the help of the British-built battleships), was eagerly taken in by Iranian intellectuals, for whom it demonstrated that the dominance of the imperialist Europeans was not unshakeable." - 200-1
• October 1906: the Majles, or national assembly, ordered by Mozaffar od-Din Shah "convened for the first time...and rapidly set about drafting a constitution, the central structure of which took the form of what were called the Fundamental Laws." - 203
• "The Majles expected to govern, and to govern on new principles. The constitution (which remained formally in force until 1979, and was based on the Belgian constitution) stated explicitly that the shah's sovereignty derived from the people, as a power given to him in trust, not as a right bestowed directly from God." - 204
• "The Constitutional Revolution marked the effective end of the Qajar era of government, and promised to usher in a period of government under more regular, legitimate, modern principles. Instead...it inaugurated a period of conflict and uncertainty." - 204
• 1907: "Britain and Russia had finally compounded their mutual suspicions and reached a treaty over their interests in Persia. The treaty showed no respect for the new condition of popular sovereignty in the country, .... This new treaty divided Persia into three zones: a zone of Russian influence in the north, including Tabriz, Tehran, Mashdad, and Isfahan -- most of the major cities; a British zone in the southeast, adjacent to the border with British India; and a neutral zone in the middle." - 207
• July 1909: Russia moves on Tehran to restore Qajar rule, "intolerant as ever of any form of popular movement".... Mohammad Ali Shah fled to the Russian legation, was deposed, and went into exile in Russia. He was replaced by his young son, Ahmad" - 208
• Morgan Schuster, a young American financial adviser appointed by the government, "assessed, probably correctly, that the deeper Russian motive was to keep the Persian government's affairs in a state of financial bankruptcy, and thus in a position of relative weakness (as supplicant for Russian loans), the better to manipulate them." - 209
• December 1911: "the Bakhtiaris and conservatives in the cabinet enacted what has been called a coup, and dismissed both Schuster and the Majles" - 209
• 1912: the British Navy switches from coal to oil - 211
• "The effect of the Russian Revolution on trade was devastating. Before 1914, sixty-five percent of foreign trade had been with Russia, but this fell to five percent by the end of the First World War." - 214
• After World War I, "The British foreign secretary at the time, Lord Curzon...proposed [in 1919] -- or, rather, he attempted to force through -- an Anglo-Persian agreement that would have reduced Persia to the status of a protectorate (parallel with the mandate arrangements being set up at the same time for Iraq and Palestine)" - 215
• February 16, 1921: "Reza Khan marched twenty-five hundred of his Cossacks from their camp near Qazvin toward Tehran." - 218
• February 21, 1921: Reza Khan takes his Cossacks "into the capital without opposition, and the shah allowed him to set up a new government" - 218
• 1925: Reza Khan takes "the name Pahlavi, which resonated with nationalists as the name of the Middle Persian language of pre-Islamic times." - 219
• 1926: Reza crowned shah after "a constituent assembly [of the Majles] agreed to a changeover from the Qajar to the Pahlavi dynasty" - 219