The ANGLO-PERSIAN Agreement

February 22, 2022 Read time 2 min

The Anglo-Persian Agreement of 1919 was a clear indication of how Iran was about to be shepherded into a semiprotectorate status. This was in contrast to the buffer status that had defined its geopolitics for more than a century.

The controversial agreement was the brainchild of two men and their evolving visions for the British imperial presence in the region: George Curzon, then the British acting foreign secretary and a longtime observer of Iranian affairs, and Percy Cox, then the British envoy in Tehran and, as it turned out, one of the most influential players in the shaping of the Arab Middle East.

Earlier in his career Curzon visited Iran, in 1891, as the Times of London’s special correspondent, and produced the voluminous Persia and the Persian Question—an overview of everything Iranian, with unmistakably imperial overtones. He viewed Iran’s material development under the benevolent aegis of the British as key for securing long-term British interests. Cox, educated in colonial India, shared with his superior the view that the agreement would grant Iran an undeclared British protectorate status under the guise of financial and military cooperation.

On the surface, the 1919 agreement indeed promised in benign terms collaboration between the two sovereign states. Britain consented to provide Iran with financial, technical, and military assistance in exchange for Iran’s exclusive reliance on Britain for such matters as defense and foreign advisers. The preamble to the agreement reaffirmed the “ties of friendship” between the two countries and promoted “progress and prosperity” of Persia, while article 1 reiterated “in the most categorical manner . . . the independence and integrity of Persia.”

Other articles stipulated the appointment of British financial and military advisers at Iran’s expense, promised a long-term British loan to finance military and economic development for which government revenues and customs were sought as security. The agreement also recognized the need for growth in trade and for development projects such as the railway. A supplementary loan agreement set the amount of the loan at £2,000,000 ($9,580,000), with 7 percent interest, and subordinated it to the servicing of an earlier loan due to be paid to Britain.

Yet below the veneer of diplomatic platitude lurked an agenda. The British motives for entering into the 1919 agreement sprang primarily from Curzon’s desire to create a chain of mandatory states and protectorates to guarantee a secure overland connection throughout the empire. He had long argued that only through active engagement in the Iranian economy, and with the control of its government apparatus and reconstruction of its army, could Britain expect a secure and stable Iran.

The arrangement served not only as a bulwark against the threat of Bolshevism but also as a sure way to include Iran, a vital but weak link, in a pax britannica that stretched from India and the Persian Gulf to Iraq, Palestine, and Egypt. The grand strategy that Curzon prescribed appealed to like-minded politicians such as Winston Churchill, who in 1919, as secretary of state for war, underscored the importance of the security of the Iranian oil fields to British postwar supremacy.

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Labels: Imperialism Iran Oil British Expansionism