The British and the French soon found out about the secret clause after it was leaked by Turkish officials. There was outrage in the Western press, which immediately suspected that the Russians had obtained not just the right to close the Straits to other powers but also the right to keep them open to their own warships – in which case they would be able to land a major force in the Bosporus and seize Constantinople in a lightning strike before any Western fleet would have time to intervene (the Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol was only four days’ sailing from the Turkish capital). In fact, the secret clause had left this point unclear. The Russians claimed that all they had wanted from the controversial clause was a means of self-defence against the possibility of an attack by France or Britain, the major naval powers in the Mediterranean, whose fleets could otherwise sail through the Straits and destroy the Russian bases at Sevastopol and Odessa before their entry into the Black Sea was discovered in St Petersburg. The Straits were ‘the keys to Russia’s house’. If they were unable to close them, the Russians would be vulnerable to an attack on their weakest frontier – the Black Sea littoral and the Caucasus – as indeed they were when Turkey and the Western powers attacked during the Crimean War.
Such arguments were discounted in the West, where Russia’s good intentions were increasingly mistrusted by informed opinion. Now, almost every Russian action on the Continent was interpreted as constituting part of a reactionary and aggressive plan of imperial expansion. ‘No reasonable doubt can be entertained that the Russian Government is intently engaged in the prosecution of those schemes of aggrandizement towards the South which, ever since the reign of Catherine, have formed a prominent feature of Russian policy,’ Palmerston wrote to Lord John Ponsonby in December 1833.
The cabinet of St Petersburg, whenever its foreign policy is adverted to, deals largely in the most unqualified declarations of disinterestedness; and protests that, satisfied with the extensive limits of the empire, it desires no increase of territory, and has renounced all those plans of aggrandizement which were imputed to Russia …
But notwithstanding these declarations, it has been observed that the encroachments of Russia have continued to advance on all sides with a steady march and a well-directed aim, and that almost every transaction of much importance, in which of late years Russia has been engaged, has in some way or other been made conducive to an alteration either of her influence or of her territory.
The recent events in the Levant have, indeed, by an unfortunate combination of circumstances, enabled her to make an enormous stride towards the accomplishment of her designs upon Turkey, and it becomes an object of great importance for the interests of Great Britain, to consider how Russia can be prevented from pushing her advantage further, and to see whether it be possible to deprive her of the advantage she has already gained.
The French statesman François Guizot maintained that the 1833 treaty had converted the Black Sea into a ‘Russian lake’ guarded by Turkey, the Tsar’s ‘vassal state’, ‘without anything hindering Russia herself from passing through the Straits and hurling her ships and soldiers into the Mediterranean’. The chargé d’affaires in St Petersburg lodged a protest with the Russian government warning that if the treaty led to Russia intervening in ‘the internal affairs of the Ottoman Empire, the French government would hold itself wholly at liberty to adopt such a line of conduct as circumstances might suggest’. Palmerston empowered Ponsonby to summon the British fleet from the Mediterranean for the defence of Constantinople, if he felt that it was threatened by Russia.27
The events of 1833 were a turning point in British policy towards Russia and Turkey. Until then, Britain’s main concern in the Ottoman Empire had been to preserve the status quo, mainly from fears that its breakup would affect the balance of power in Europe and possibly lead to a European war, rather than from any firm commitment to the sovereignty of the Sultan (their support for Greece had not demonstrated much of that). But once the British woke up to the danger that the Ottoman Empire might be taken over by the Egyptians at the head of a powerful Muslim revival, or, even worse, that it might become a Russian protectorate, they took an active interest in Turkey. They increasingly intervened in Ottoman affairs, encouraging economic and political reforms by which the British hoped to restore the health of the Ottoman Empire and expand their influence.
Britain’s interests were mainly commercial. The Ottoman Empire was a growing market for the export of British manufactures and a valuable source of raw materials. As the dominant industrial power in the world, Britain generally threw its weight behind the opening up of global markets to free trade; as the dominant naval power, it was prepared to use its fleet to force foreign governments to open up their markets. This was a type of ‘informal empire’, an ‘imperialism of free trade’, in which Britain’s military power and political influence advanced its commercial hegemony and curtailed the independence of foreign governments without the direct controls of imperial rule.
Nowhere was this more in evidence than in the Ottoman Empire. Ponsonby was at pains to stress the economic dividends of increased British influence in Constantinople. ‘Protection given to our political interests’, the ambassador wrote to Palmerston in 1834, ‘will throw open sources of commercial prosperity perhaps hardly to be hoped for from our intercourse with any other country upon earth.’ By this time there was a large and powerful body of British traders with extensive interests in Turkey who put growing pressure on the government to intervene. Their viewpoint was expressed in influential periodicals, such as Blackwood’s and the Edinburgh Review, both of which depended on their patronage; and it found an echo in the arguments of Turcophiles, such as David Urquhart, the leader of a secret trade mission to Turkey in 1833, who saw a huge potential for British commerce in the development of the Ottoman economy. ‘The progress of Turkey,’ Urquhart wrote in 1835, ‘if undisturbed by political events, bids fair to render it, in a few years, the largest market in the world for English manufacturers.’28
In 1838, through a series of military threats and promises, Britain imposed on the Porte a Tariff Convention which in effect transformed the Ottoman Empire into a virtual free-trade zone. Deprived of tariff revenues, the Porte’s ability to protect its nascent industries was seriously handicapped. From this moment the export of British manufactured goods to Turkey rose steeply. There was an elevenfold increase by 1850, making it one of Britain’s most valuable export markets (surpassed only by the Hanseatic towns and the Netherlands). After the repeal of the protectionist Corn Laws in 1846, British imports of cereals from Turkey, chiefly from Moldavia and Wallachia, increased as well. The advent of ocean steamships, steam river-boats and railroads opened up the Danube for the first time as a busy commercial highway. The river’s trade was dominated by British merchant ships exporting grain to western Europe and importing manufactures from Britain. The British were in direct competition with the merchants of Odessa, Taganrog and other Black Sea ports, from which the grain of Russia’s breadbasket in the Ukraine and south Russia was exported to the West. The cereal export market was increasingly important to Russia as the value of its timber trade declined during the steam age. By the middle of the nineteenth century the Black Sea ports were handling one-third of all Russian exports. The Russians tried to give their traders an advantage over their British rivals through their control of the Danube delta after 1829 by subjecting foreign ships to time-consuming quarantine controls and even allowing the Danube to silt up and become once more unnavigable.