ABSTRACT
SO Round about And round about And round and round about And round about And round about I go. A.A. Milne Now We are Six The behaviour of Englishmen in the Middle East in the nineteenth century resembled a formation dance more complicated than the Circassian Circle. As Lord Curzon would explain it, the British walked round and round, regularly returning to their starting point having done nothing on the way. 1 The best example of this was given by Curzon himself. At the end of the First World War, he and Lord Hardinge, another former viceroy of India, who had gone back to his previous job of permanent under-secretary for foreign affairs, tried to answer a question the British had been asking since 1798. Their choice of Batum as the forward base from which sea power could protect India cheaply and far away, made it the last in a series of proposed bases which had begun with the selection of the islands of Perim in the straits of Bab el-Mandab and Kharg in the Persian Gulf during the war of the Second Coalition. 2 In the interval, the British selection had ranged from Cyprus and Alexandretta in the eastern Mediterranean to Sukkur on the Indus. All of the possible choices turned out to be unsuitable for the same reason: they entangled Great Britain in local affairs in the Middle East instead of permitting the British to decide when and in what way they would intervene.
