'The Middle Eastern question or some political problems of Indian defence' [‎20r] (44/616)

THE ANGLO-PERSIAN TREATY OF 1857 15
between the impending outbreak of the Indian meeting
and the hasty conclusion of peace with Persia. But a
mere comparison of dates disposes once for all of that
fiction. The treaty was negotiated in Paris in March,
1857, an d neither at home nor in India had the official
ear caught at that time even the faintest mutterings of
the storm which was to break over India two months
later. The true explanation is that the importance of
Persia as a factor in the Asiatic problem, which had
been momentarily realised under the pressure of the
Napoleonic danger at the beginning of the last century,
had then been once more entirely lost sight of.
The Crimean war had just been fought, and the
Eastern question, as the Asiatic problem was then
called, centred at that time in Constantinople. It
was held to have been settled under the walls of
Sebastopol. The remoteness of Persia, the pressure
we could always exercise upon her as the masters of
India, and her vulnerability in the Persian Gulf The historical term used to describe the body of water between the Arabian Peninsula and Iran. com
bined to relegate her to a subsidiary position on the
political chessboard. Russia, no doubt, had been for
a long time pressing heavily upon Persia from the
Caucasus, indeed ever since the days when Peter the
Great made his descent upon the southern shores of
the Caspian, and the Treaties of Gulistan in 1813 and
of Turkman Tchai in 1828 had already demonstrated
the powerlessness of Persia to arrest the southward
progress of her northern neighbour to the west of the
Caspian. But Russia's conquests appeared to consti
tute merely a not unnatural extension of her European
Empire, and she hardly claimed at that time to be a
great Power in Asia, notwithstanding the vast extent of
territory over which she held sway in the north. Though
the diplomatic records of Teheran contained ample