Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan (Chapters 14-18)

Chapter 14: The Road to Empire. This chapter is about the rise of British power in India, which effectively depressed the overland trade system.

• Begins with some interesting thoughts about "Why Europe?" leads the charge, esp. in comparison to the Ottomans: "Islamic societies generally distributed wealth more evenly than their Christian counterparts," and primogeniture in Europe allowed capital to concentrate more effectively.
• Puritans in New England were reactionaries, anxious about Europe's wealth, trying to escape to the past, free from rising prosperity and exotic imports. 
• 17th-century British maritime revolution included a Muslim-type meritocracy: 
• "a system that rewarded those who had served for longest in the most important capacities. It was broadly identical to the organisation put in place in the earliest days of Islam and which had proved so effective during the Muslim conquests. In England now too, spoils were shared according to a pre-set allocation, with officers and sailors rewarded in proportion to seniority and length of service. This made promotion highly desirable and lucrative, which again served to propel the most able to the top, especially as the process was overseen by the Admiralty board, whose aim was to filter out favouritism and partiality. These were optimum labour contracts, in other words, designed to reward and incentivise performance; furthermore, they were fair."
• The unlikeliness of Britain, explained by the advantage of geography, which insulated the island and allowed them to spend less on military defense and to pick and choose battles that roiled the continent.
• The success of the EIC in India, transformation from a trading to an occupying power: Elihu Yale in Madras and Robert Clive's rapacity in Bengal as example of profiting in the "Wild East"
• At first, impact on Central Asia was negligible/positive, as the horse trade flourished, and the old overland trade routes continued. At first Asia only benefitted from European contacts: "On one level, such intrigues were of little concern to those in the east, who cared little if the Dutch, British, French or others held the upper hand. In fact if anything, the rivalries in Europe seemed merely to generate increasingly lavish benefits." But eventually attitudes began to shift toward rapacity.
• American Revolution in the context of the Asia: raising taxes in North America stemmed from England's getting rich too quick in India, London's need to bail out the EIC after its policies led to the 1770 Bengal famine. Loss of American colonies was a price willingly paid to hang on to what was becoming an empire in Asia, as "Britain found itself administering [non-British] peoples who had laws and customs of their own, and having to work out what to borrow from new communities, what to lend – and how to build a platform that was workable and sustainable."

Chapter 15: The Road to Crisis. This chapter is about the Great Game, competition between Britain and a newly emerging Russian Empire for control of Central Asia. Frankopan goes so far as to say that WWI was caused by these "tensions over the control of Asia" (with Persia and Afghanistan losing out as the pawn caught in the tug-of-war between the two great powers.

Some tidbits:

• Russia's rise at Persia's expense is seen in a series of Russo-Persian Wars over territories in the Caucasus.
• 1842 massacre in the British retreat from Kabul is called "one of the most humiliating and notorious episodes in British military history, the evacuating column under the command of Major-General Elphinstone was attacked on its way to Jalalabad through the mountain passes and annihilated in the winter snow. "
• The Crimean War as Britain's attempt to cut Russia down to size in Central Asia, despite what Frankopan calls Russia's "decidedly modest" aims in the region, but the humiliating Peace of Paris (1856) foisted on Russia had the opposite, Versailles-like effect: "Far from bottling Russia up, the British helped let the genie out of the bottle" with ripple effects in Italian unification and Marxism as well.

Make me want to read Orlando Figes's history of the Crimean War!

Chapter 16: The Road to War. This chapter is about how tension between Britain and Russia over influence in Asia is what led to World War I, an interesting narrative that's not emphasized elsewhere: "Russia’s rising ambition and the progress it was making in Persia, Central Asia and the Far East put pressure on Britain’s position overseas, resulting in the fossilisation of alliances in Europe."

Some especially interesting bits:

• Queen Victoria becomes an Empress, hoping the elevated title will help hold onto India, in an age of growing fears of a "possible Russian invasion of the Raj."
• British attempts to win over support in Afghanistan by bribing Muslim clerics " served to strengthen religious authority across a fractious region that was the focus of intense competition from outside."
•  Sir Edward Grey's plan to deal with Russia: "Britain’s position in the east was limited and dangerously exposed. What was needed was the reorientation of Russia’s focus away from this region altogether."  But this "rapprochement with Russia came at a price: Germany." Suspicion of Germany was played up. Germany's turn to the Ottomans alarmed Russia, which counted on controlling the Dardanelles. 
• None of the victors really won; instead, they found themselves in deep debt which resulted in a reversal of the flow of wealth between the hemispheres: "a redistribution of wealth every bit as dramatic as that which followed the discovery of the Americas four centuries earlier: money flowed out of Europe to the United States in a flood of bullion and promissory notes. The war bankrupted the Old World and enriched the New."

"In the days after the assassination, it was fear of Russia that led to war. In Germany’s case, it was the widespread apprehension about its neighbour to the east that was crucial. The Kaiser was repeatedly told by his generals that the threat posed by Russia would get stronger as its economy continued to surge forward.101 This was echoed in St Petersburg, where senior officials had formed the view that war was inevitable and that it was better for military confrontation to begin sooner rather than later.102 The French too were anxious, having concluded long before that the best course they could take was to urge constant and consistent moderation in St Petersburg, as well as in London. They would support Russia come what may.103 In Britain’s case, it was the fear of what would happen if Russia cast its lot elsewhere that drove policy. "

Chapter 17: The Road of Black Gold. This chapter is about the discovery of oil in the Middle East, which coincides with the start of WWI. I already knew the broad outline of concessions, the Royal Navy (Churchill), and Allies' double-promises and efforts to divide up the Middle East for themselves, but there are some great stories and details here.

• William Knox D'Arcy awarded the concession to explore for oil in Persia by the Shah in 1901 announcing that "Knox D’Arcy and ‘all his heirs and assigns and friends’ had been granted ‘full powers and unlimited liberty for a period of sixty years to probe, pierce and drill at their will the depths of Persian Soil’, and entreated ‘all officials of this blessed kingdom’ to help a man who enjoyed ‘the favour of our splendid court’.23 He had been handed the keys to the kingdom; the question was whether he could now find the lock." 
• Later in the chapter, Frankopan says, "The discovery of oil made the piece of paper signed by the Shah in 1901 one of the most important documents of the twentieth century. For while it laid the basis for a multi-billion-dollar business to grow – the Anglo-Persian Oil Company eventually became British Petroleum – it also paved the way for political turmoil. That the terms of the agreement handed control of Persia’s crown jewels to foreign investors led to a deep and festering hatred of the outside world, which in turn led to nationalism and, ultimately, to a more profound suspicion and rejection of the west best epitomised in modern Islamic fundamentalism. The desire to win control of oil would be the cause of many problems in the future.... On a human level, Knox D’Arcy’s concession is an amazing tale of business acumen and triumph against the odds; but its global significance is on a par with Columbus’ trans-Atlantic discovery of 1492. Then too, immense treasures and riches had been expropriated by the conquistadors and shipped back to Europe. The same thing happened again" (320). 

• And the problems faced in doing so: "what one leading British businessman described as ‘the backward state of the country, and the absence of communication and transport’, made worse by the ‘direct hostility, opposition and outrage from high officials of the Persian Government.'" Plus "There was open hostility too in the form of complaints about pay, about working practices and about the small number of locals who were employed, while there was also no end of trouble with local tribes wanting to be bought off."
• British back-dealing to keep/win allies throughout the war was at the expense of the Middle East: overpromising an empire to the Arabs, giving away control of Constantinople and the Dardanelles to Russia ("the richest prize of the entire war"), etc. In such a way that the U.S. complained that the French and British "are making [the Middle East] a breeding place for future war." 
• The Royal Navy managed to buy a controlling share of Anglo-Persian Oil Company less than 2 weeks before Sarajevo, thus securing itself control of oil supplies in WWI, which was a decisive move since after the war Lord Curzon said that "the Allied cause had floated to victory upon a wave of oil." Frankopan says that "what happened in the centre of Asia was of major significance to the outcome of the Great War – and even more important to the period that followed."

Chapter 18: The Road to Compromise (or "The Battle for the Heart of the World" in the audiobook version). The audiobook title makes more sense to me, as this chapter is about the disastrous western -- mostly British and U.S. -- meddling in Iraq, Persia, Palestine, and Central Asia after WWI. The British come off looking particularly bad, operating with a "lofty sense of entitlement" and leaving the region full of "broken promises and disappointed peoples" that left a legacy of ill-will and mistrust:

• Selfish attempts to rework previous agreement with France (Sykes-Picot) and redraw lines in their favor: "I want Mosul!... I want Jerusalem too" for control of oil reserves.
• Balfour Declaration: "Concerns had been growing about the rising levels of Jewish immigration to Britain" with some earlier plans made to settle Jews in East Africa before shifting attention to Palestine.
• Clumsy combining of 3 different Ottoman provinces into a "rickety construction" called Iraq, that looked like a country but in which Britain pulled all the strings. This story makes me want to read more about Gertrude Bell!
• Same with Persia, where the British convinced the Shah (in return for money) to install their puppet choice, Reza Khan, as PM.
• Anglo-Persian Oil Co's continual efforts to get out of paying royalty payments

The U.S. too, which was at first seen by Persia as a white knight but in the end were called "more British than the British" after winning a 50-year concession for Standard Oil (encouraged by the State Dept.). Frankopan says, 

"The story had familiar echoes of the discovery of the Americas 400 years earlier. While local populations had not been decimated in the same way as those encountered by the Spanish, the process was effectively the same: the expropriation of treasures by the nations of the west meant that riches flowed out of one continent to another, with minimal benefit to the inhabitants of those lands. There were other parallels with what had happened following Columbus’ sailing across the Atlantic. Just as Spain and Portugal had divided the world between them with the treaties of Tordesillas in 1494 and Zaragoza three decades later, so too did the western powers now split the resources of the world lying between the Mediterranean and Central Asia" (339).

This led to increasing nationalism in the region (with self-determination sentiments, calls for revolution, encouraged by Soviet Russia):

• Baku Conference in 1920:  (aka "Congress of the Peoples of the East"), where Soviets fomented dreams of international revolution, and which the British saw as a threat to their control of India: "‘We are now faced with the task of kindling a real holy war’ against the west, [the Soviet delegate] told listeners. The time had come, he said, to ‘educate the masses of the East to hate and to want to fight against the rich’. That meant fighting against the wealthy ‘Russian, Jewish, German, French . . . and organizing a true people’s holy war, in the first place against British imperialism’.16 The hour had arrived, that is, for a showdown between east and west."
• Spreading progressive ideas about gender equality: "women were given the vote in the Kyrgyz, Turkmen, Ukrainian and Azerbaijani Soviet republics – before they were given the vote in the United Kingdom."
• Cancellation of the Knox D'Arcy concession in 1932, after which the company chairman complained "we had been pretty well plucked."