Peter Frankopan (2015) The Silk Roads. A New History of the World

I thought myself pretty smart, when I was wee, writing my name and street and town and county (Scotland) and Europe and World and Universe. I was, of course, centre of the Jack O’Donnellian world. Just imagine if you were American President? A narcissistic psychopath that couldn’t imagine he wasn’t the centre of the world. His blot on the map irreversible.

We don’t need a Galileo to show the Trumpicentric view of the universe is as crazy as it sounds, perhaps even more so. Peter Frankopan offers historical scale and an understanding of the ways in which the world works. He argues that the spine of civilisation runs through the Middle East and Far East and is returning to its ancient trade routes.  

Recent, ‘Maximum Pressure’ U.S. interventions in the Persian Gulf are not isolated incidents—they are part of an ongoing struggle over a centuries-old global trade at any price as long as oil flowed.

Britain’s jewel in the Crown was India from which much of its wealth flowed to a small, cold country. Its naval dominance was dependent on modernising the fleet and it needed oil, oil and more oil. Persia was where it was mostly found. British Petroleum created a monopoly, which was defended by the Empire.

Frankopan shows how the ancient worlds were tied together by a desire for luxury goods, connecting the Roman Empire with China through a network of trade arteries. Silk was not only a means of exchange it was also payment to hordes of tribes outside China. It didn’t rot like payments of grain. Nor did it lose value as coins did.

Oil and gas has many of the same properties as silk. Money, not in the bank, but underground.

The melting pot argument.  Those regions where ideas, philosophies, and religions (Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Christianity and later Islam) clashed and assimilated. Borrowing from each other such as the (now heretical idea) of having for example the image of the Prophet Muhammad on the face of a coin.

Long before a Roman emperor saw a cross in the sky and adopted Christianity as the state religion, trade routes to and from Persia offered enormous wealth to city states.

Luxury goods included men, women and children as slaves. Vikings and Khazars traded for silver and glory.

Roads of Gold, Silver and Black Death. Trade routes not only of wealth. Columbus and Vasco da Gama shift the global economic centre from Asia to the Atlantic, fuelled by American silver; they export European diseases and commit genocide for the glory of God. Spain and Portugal become world powers and the centre of the mapped world.

England is one of the poorer nations, God forsaken.

Britain’s Empire is then built on its navy, which opens up the world for plunder. Beating down competition on land by its superior technology at sea.

Global rivalries with France and Germany in particular as they carve up the world and remake it in the image of the white man’s burden. War is a falling out over the fractures in the Ottoman Empire. Each nation demands its entitlements.

Britain wins the war but loses the peace. American businesses thrive and hold all the debtor nations in their grasp. Gold is not in Fort Know but Black Gold. It needs to be brought home at any price.

Britain controlled Persia and the Persian Gulf. The twenty-one mile Strait of Hormuz was no longer a place of trade transit but potential chokehold, similar to the Suez Canal. It was too important to leave to natives. British Petroleum territory renamed.  

Iraq: Fabricated from the Ottoman Ruins

Before World War I, Iraq did not exist as a unified state. The land was known geographically as Mesopotamia (the land between the rivers) and was ruled by the Ottoman Empire. It was divided into three separate, distinct administrative provinces (‘vilayets’):

Mosul in the north (predominantly Kurdish and Sunni Arab). Saddam Hussein repeatedly used mustard gas here.

Baghdad in the centre (predominantly Sunni Arab).

Basra in the south (predominantly Shia Arab).

These three regions had vastly different economic ties, tribal structures, and religious identities. Britain changed all of that for two reasons: oil and empire.

The Blueprint (Sykes-Picot and The Mandate)

During WWI, Britain and France signed the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916), slicing up the Middle East into spheres of influence in for example Palestine. When the war ended and the Ottomans collapsed, the newly formed League of Nations awarded Britain the official ‘Mandate for Mesopotamia’ at the San Remo Conference in 1920.

The Forced Marriage of Three Provinces

The British lumped Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra together into one single state.

The Oil Fix: British intelligence realized the northern province of Mosul was sitting on massive oil reserves. They forcefully attached it to the central and southern provinces to ensure their new creation was financially viable and under their thumb.

The Port: Basra provided the essential deep-water access to the Persian Gulf, securing maritime pipelines for the British Navy.

Crushing the Resistance and installing a King

The local populations demanded independence.  They did not want British rule. In 1920, a massive, bloody coalition of Shia Clerics, Sunni tribesmen, and Kurds launched the Iraqi Revolt, nearly driving the British out.

Realizing direct colonial rule was too expensive and bloody, Winston Churchill (then Colonial Secretary) convened the Cairo Conference in 1921. He opted for ‘indirect rule’ the kind used in India. He imported a foreign king: Faisal I, a Hashemite prince from Mecca who had just been kicked out of Syria by the French. To save money on ground troops, the British pioneered ‘aerial policing’—using the Royal Air Force (RAF) to bomb dissenting villages into submission.

Through the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1922, Britain created a state with highly volatile internal fractures, bound together by a foreign monarch and British military backing.

Iran: Coerced, renaming Persia

Unlike Iraq, Persia (Iran) was not an Ottoman province, nor was it a piece of land created by a British pen. Persia was an ancient, sovereign empire with deeply rooted historical borders. However, Britain treated it like an economic protectorate.

Oil Monopoly

In 1908, oil was discovered in southwest Persia. A British businessman secured a massive, exploitative concession, creating the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC)—which would later become British Petroleum (BP). By WWI, the British government bought a controlling share of APOC. Persia's oil was now fuelling the entire British Royal Navy, but the Persian people saw virtually none of the profits of the biggest oil field in the world.

The Attempted Takeover (1919)

With Russia crippled by the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Britain tried to seize total control of Persia. They bribed the corrupt, failing Qajar Dynasty to sign the Anglo-Persian Agreement of 1919. This treaty would have turned Persia into a de facto British protectorate, putting the Persian military and treasury under British advisors.

The Persian public and parliament were furious, refusing to ratify it. Realizing the Qajar dynasty was too weak to protect British oil interests from domestic anger or Soviet influence, Britain looked for a strongman.

Reza Shah (1921)

In 1921, a military commander Reza Khan led a successful coup d'état. While Britain did not directly orchestrate every detail of the coup, British military officers on the ground in Persia actively encouraged, supplied, and cleared the way for Reza Khan, viewing him as a stable bulwark against communism and a protector of their oil infrastructure.

Reza Khan consolidated power, abolished the old dynasty, and declared himself Reza Shah Pahlavi.

Name Change: In 1935, Reza Shah requested that foreign nations stop using the Greek-given name 'Persia' and instead use the native name of the country: Iran (meaning  ‘Land of the Aryans), signalling a shift toward modern nationalism and a break from Western imperial framing.

Iraq was three separate Ottoman provinces (Mosul, Baghdad, Basra). Fabricated a new nation and new flag. Glued three incompatible ethnic/sectarian groups together under an imported king to control the oil fields. Created a structurally unstable state plagued by decades of coups, civil unrest, and dictatorships trying to hold the artificial borders together.

Iran. An ancient sovereign empire (Persia). Exploited oil wealth, backed military strongmen to protect pipelines. Indirectly facilitated the rise of the Pahlavi dynasty whose brutal methods of suppression were ignored. Planted deep-seated anti-Western resentment regarding stolen resources, laying the groundwork for the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Carter and Reagan traded weapons for hostages. America and Israel also provided weapons to Khomeini directly and indirectly despite an apparent trade embargo.

Britain invented Iraq, in the same way it invented Pakistan, by drawing lines on a map. Saddam Hussein was the kind of strongman they could work with. America armed him as they helped arm insurgents in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion. Ironically, China also helped arm the insurgents.

The ability of the mujahideen to blend in with the local populace led to mass murder of civilians and fed into the hatred of foreigners as American (with some British) forces were to find with the invasion of Iran and Afghanistan.

The Iran-Iraq war with its use of mustard gas and the subsequent U.S. invasions of Iraq show a West deeply entangled in trying to stabilize a region it stabiles and destabilises and backs both sides sometime concurrently, while also pushing sanctions.

Frankopan reminds us that those who control the crossroads of trade control the world. China’s Belt and Buckle approach is to bring nations closer, while moving away from fossil fuels. Trump’s bluster and sabre rattling has a familiar ring. Iraq doesn’t need to win the war, or control the narrative. It just needs to not lose.

The Silk Road has oil at its centre. But that too is changing. Yesterday’s fuel of global warming, today. President Obama suggested America and the world is in a moment of transition. Taking backward steps is how once mighty nations fall. Read on.