Anglo-Russian Entente

The blue areas of Persia were to be Russian controlled, while the southeast pink region was to be British.

The Anglo-Russian Entente or the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 was an accord signed on 31 August 1907 in St. Petersburg by Count Alexander Izvolsky, Foreign Minister of the Russian Empire, and Sir Arthur Nicolson, Britain's ambassador in Russia.

The convention capped off several decades of the Great Game between the two powers. It defined their respective spheres of influence in Persia, Afghanistan, and Tibet. Its primary aim was to resolve the long-running disputes over the powers' respective imperial peripheries, though it also served their broader diplomatic objectives by helping to provide a counterweight to German influence. The Anglo-Russian Entente along with the Entente Cordiale (1904) and the Franco-Russian Alliance (1892) formed the so-called Triple Entente between the UK, France and Russia.

The convention had three sections, dealing with Persia, Afghanistan and Tibet.

• Persia was divided into three zones: a British zone in the south, a Russian zone in the north, and a narrow neutral zone serving as buffer in between. (The Convention was very careful not to call any of these zones a sphere of influence, for fear it would look like the Great Powers were partitioning Persia.)
• As regards Afghanistan, Russia recognized the country as a semi-protectorate of Great Britain and "abandoned its earlier efforts to establish direct relations with the emir".^[1]
• Following the British expedition to Tibet, both powers agreed to maintain territorial integrity of this buffer state and "to deal with Lhasa only through China, the suzerain power".^[2]

The accord concerning Persia, which had 5 articles, was signed without the participation or knowledge of the Persian government, and was thus eventually met with a bitter response from Iran's parliament. Iran was officially informed of the Accord later, on 16 September 1907. Similarly, the Emir of Afghanistan refused to acknowledge the agreement concerning Afghanistan. Both China and Tibet government at Lhasa rejected the agreement concerning China and Tibet.

References

General

• Adelson, R. London and the Invention of the Middle East: Money, Power and War, 1902-1922. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. 1995. p.59-62.
• Gelvin, James L. The Modern Middle East: A History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Khater, Akram Fouad. Sources in the History of the Modern Middle East. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004.
• Siegel, Jennifer. Endgame: Britain, Russia and the Final Struggle for Central Asia. London: I.B. Tauris, 2002.

Inline

See also

• Entente Cordiale