Talk:Harford Jones-Brydges

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M. E. Yapp: The choice of Jones [as the first British Resident in Baghdad 1798-1806] was unhappy. He has never been popular with historians, partly because of his later celebrated dispute with John Malcolm in Iran. But both in Baghdad and in Iran he appears as a man more sinned against than sinning. His temper was violent, he quarelled with almost all his associates, his ambition made him at times less than scrupulous. But he suffered immense provocation from Manesty and later Malcolm and Minto without adequate support. It was Jones's fate that he dramatized important issues of policy in the form of personal quarrels. His quarrel with Malcolm involved the whole problem of whether relations with Iran should be controlled from India or London. So too his quarrel with Manesty involved the important issue of whether, in the changing intersts of Britain in Asia, political or commercial motives should prevail in British representation in the Pashalik of Baghdad.

Edward Ingram: The part played by Jones in helping to formulate British policy in the Middle East in the early nineteenth century has been undervalued (even by Yapp who first drew attention to Jones's agency at Baghdad), for Jones did as much as Malcolm to devise the strategic vocabulary which gradually determined British policy, rather than merely supplying the framework in which policy might be developed. It was Jones who insisted on the strategic importance of Basra and Baghdad to Great Britain, claiming them as a British sphere of influence equivalent to the Russian sphere of influence in Moldavia and Wallachia. Similarly Jones exposed the strategic futility of Malcolm's island base in the Persian Gulf. ... Jones's career would be ruined in 1810 when his conception of Persia as a buffer state collided with a demand from the foreign office for an Indian-style subsidiary alliance.