1826-1834 The South African Crisis
The South African crisis that shook Al-Opheeria to its core in the 1820s and 1830s was decades in the making. The colony had endured harsh economic headwinds for more than a generation. Once at the centre of the global slave trade stretching between the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, the colony had been hit by the collapse of the Atlantic trade in the 1780s and then the Indian Ocean trade in the 1810s in the face of Scottish power. The most heavily settled and developed part of the colony, around the Cape, had also seen many of its gold mines – for so long central to its prosperity – exploited to exhaustion. In response, increasing numbers of creoles had left the Cape for an inland trek into the South African interior. There they disrupted the balance between the comparatively small creole populations of the north and the powerful, semi-independent, Bantu tribes. As the early nineteenth century wore on, there was increasingly heated and angry competition over land, resources and political authority overlain with racialised animosity between the Middle Eastern creoles and the Africans.
In the midst of the destabilisation of the region, a great war chief arose among the Zulus – a Bantu ethnic group living in the north eastern corner of the colony. The Zulus had historically been divided between many different tribes, but came together to elect the great warrior Mpande as their King in the hopes that he would protect their homeland from the encouragement of the settlers. In the summer 1826, Mpande would lead his warbands to oppose the creation of a new creole settlement on traditionally Zulu land – surrounding the villages and slaughtering its three hundred inhabitants, man, woman and child. Disgusted by this barbarism, the Assyrian military garrison rushed 9,000 men to confront the Zulus with force. At the Battle of Ulundi, 60,000 Zulus would come down upon this Assyrian force and despite possessing only a few outdated rifles and no horses or artillery, would utterly destroy this force. In the aftermath of this bloody victory, Mpande proclaimed Zulu independence from Assyria and called upon all blacks – the other Bantu tribes and in particular South Africa's quarter of a million slaves – to rise up together to overthrow the creoles.
With the Zulus launching bloody raids against settler communities throughout the northern part of Al-Opheeria during which they would massacre all the creoles they could find, free their slaves and press-gang them to join their army, their revolutionary message would spread quickly throughout Southern Africa. Indeed, the Scots, ever eager to push forward their own geopolitical agenda, would deliberately fan the flames of revolt by providing firearms to the Zulus and spreading the anti-slavery message in the Cape. It was in the southern part of Al-Opheeria, around the Cape – with its teeming Swazi slave population, that the Zulu agenda proved particularly explosive as a largescale slave revolt broke out – seeing Swazis turn on their masters with machetes, ploughs and pickaxes and swear their loyalty to the liberator King Mpande in the north.
The situation was growing gravely out of hand. After their losses at Ulundi, the Assyrian garrison in Al-Opheeria lacked the resources to adequately defend the colony – focussing its strength in the Cape and largely leaving the creole militias of the northern interior to fend for themselves. The leaders of Al-Opheeria's colonial assembly were forced to sent a desperate plea to the north for assistance in regaining control.
Events in South Africa were hugely controversial in metropolitan Assyria. While there were significant pools of sympathy for the Al-Opheerians on the Right and through the public more generally, where many saw their own kith and kin suffering at the hands of the Zulus and rebel slaves, the Liberals saw the belligerence of the Al-Opheerians as the source of the bloody violence and demanded that the provision of military assistance be condition on reform in the colony. However, with Vizier Nubar leaning on the Conservatives to support his majority in the Majlis, anything other than unreserved support was out of the question. Some 50,000 soldiers would be deployed from Assyria to Al-Opheeria in 1827 to restore order to the colony.
Working closely alongside the colony's longstanding garrison and large network of experienced creole militias, these troops would prove decisive in crushing the rebellions by the middle of 1828 under the weight of overwhelming fire power and expert military force. Acting under the pressure of the Al-Opheerian assembly, the victorious Assyrian army would shockingly allow the creole slaveholders to compensate themselves for the loss of slaves and destruction of property during the rebellion by taking a portion of the defeated rebel population into slavery – an act that echoed the earlier crushing of the Swazi Confederation a century and a half before, but drew angry condemnation both within Assyria and around the world.
The political consequences of the Zulu Rebellion were significant and long lasting. The brutality of the war saw a surge of abolitionist activism on the Left and a split within the Moderate Majlis caucus. The Moderate majority had been lost in the 1826 election and Vizier Nubar had become increasingly dependent on the Conservatives rather than the Liberals to maintain his grip on the Majlis. This alliance had been pushed by influential rightwingers on the Moderate benches who were staunchly pro-slavery and pro-Al-Opheerian. As such, the left wing of the Moderates were increasingly alienated from power.
This left wing could only be pushed so far. Sidelined and ignored, a group of several dozen Moderate Majlis members under the leadership of Nasib Naimy, the runner-up in the 1826 Vizieral election, drifted away from the government. Ahead of the 1829 mid term elections, these members, many of them with governing experience and networks of influence and patronage of their own, would stun the Assyrian political realm. Uniting with the Ishtarians, they would announce the creation of the Liberal Republican Party – the first formal political party of its kind in Assyrian history, that would run on a joint manifesto of free trade, modernisation and abolitionism. The face of the new alliance would by Naimy himself, identified as the future Liberal Republican Vizieral candidate in an attempt to appeal beyond the traditional Liberal vote.
Majlis Election Results, 1829
The split would pay quickly pay dividends in the following mid term elections. The Liberal Republicans surged to achieve a plurality in the Majlis. In truth, they largely defended existing Ishtarian seats and those of the Moderate defectors, with modest gains. But in the popular vote, a notable chunk of Moderate voters were detached from the governing party, following Naimy into the new Liberal block. It was the first time Liberals had been the largest block within the Majlis since Malik Abaya's coup eight decades before and only the second time since then, the other occasion being during the Conservative ascendancy of 1781-1787, that the Moderates had not been the largest faction. The combined forces of the right still had a majority in the assembly, but the left had not been so close to power in generations.
In the aftermath of the vote, much of the Republic – and indeed many in Al-Opheeria – were gripped by terror of an imminent future Liberal victory, with fears of an upturned social order and destabilised society. With the Moderates and Conservatives pushed yet further together to maintain control of the Majlis, lines between the two groupings became increasingly blurred as the old divides over the Republic and Monarchy appeared less significant than the unifying desire to keep the Liberals out.
The late 1820s and early 1830s marked the moment when the first sprouts of the industrial revolution truly began to take hold in Assyria in a number of different locations. In Egypt, the large scale Italian investment in the cotton industry spilled over into the setting up of a number of textile workshops making use of industrial methods in Alexandria, Cairo and Damietta. With easy access to locally produced cotton, these mills would quickly establish themselves and by the early 1830s drive Assyrian textile production above its 1817 level despite the continued decline of traditional producers across the Republic. In Syria, the Lebanon saw notable growth in logging and processing of prized cedar trees for export to the west and a rebound in the local shipbuilding industry while in the interior wineries in particular enjoyed a period of rapid growth with the benefit of Italian investment.
Perhaps most impressive was the construction of the first major railway in Assyria. Actually beginning in Tabriz in the Timurid Empire, it stretched westward through the valleys and passes of the Armenian Highlands to the city of Amid. This transportation artery connected the coal mines of north western Persia with the large stocks of iron ore that could be found in the Armenian highlands – allowing for growth in the domestic iron industry and the emergence of the birth of a modern steel industry. The steel and iron of Amid would then be transported down the Tigris to the great Mesopotamian cities of Nineveh, Samarra and Baghdad to fuel their own emerging industries. Assyria was embarking on a path that would change the Middle East forever.
Seventh Vizieral Election Results, 1832
Majlis Election Results, 1832
Few elections in Assyrian history had been so hotly anticipated as 1832. After the extraordinary results of 1829 that had seen the Liberal Republicans secure a plurality in the Majlis, the prospect of an alteration of power and with it a direct threat to the existing social system was alive throughout the land. There was significant tension in the lead up to the vote, physical violence in major cities, almost jubilant riots in the Black ghettos of the North, unrest in many slave-holding states of the Republic. Tensions were deliberately emphasised by the leadership of the Moderates, who appealed strongly the the Conservative right in an effort to unite the opposition the Liberals. Ejecting the geriatric figure of Nubar in favour of a fiery rightist candidate from the Jordan Valley, Omar El-Issa, the Moderates attracted significant numbers of sitting Conservative deputies to run under their own banner. As such, the most prominent theme of the election would be the diminishing of Conservatism as an independent third force in Assyrian politics.
The Vizieral vote was extraordinarily tight. El-Issa overcame his opponent – Nasib Naimy, the runner up six years before and the leader of the Left-Moderate faction that had rebelled to join with the Ishtarians in 1829. The Conservative third place finisher fell to by far the worst ever performance of a monarchist Vizier candidate with just 6% of the vote. In the Majlis, things were similarly tight. The Liberal Republicans actually bettered their strong mid-term result three years previously, rising to a lofty 281 seats. However, they were outweighed by the gains made by the Moderates – largely achieved by co-opting former Conservatives into their own coalition. The remaining Conservatives themselves, while continuing to hold the balance of power in the Majlis, were reduced to a rump of a few dozen members.
From the 1810s, Italy and Germany had been in close competition for influence in Assyria – with both nations taking significant economic and diplomatic interest in the country. These foreign interests seeped into domestic Assyrian politics. Italy had significant support in the Levant and especially in Egypt, where its investments were crucial to the growing cotton trade, while the Germans had the greatest sway in Armenia. It was partly in an attempt to shore up Moderate support in Egypt ahead of the 1832 elections that Assyria had entered into a formal alliance with Italy in 1830. By doing so, Nineveh entangled the Federal Republic in the power struggles of Europe. Just three years later, in October 1833, the alliance would be activated with the outbreak the Ragusan War, started after Italy and Byzantium came to blows over the Adriatic city of Ragusa and called upon their respective allies.
Events in the Ragusan War would move very fast. Despite its recent victory over the Timurids, the Assyrian military would find itself ill-equipped for war against two major European powers at once. While the Italians invaded the Byzantine Balkans through Assyrian-aligned Albania and moved to establish naval supremacy in the Eastern Mediterranean alongside the Assyrian fleet, both the Byzantines and Chernigovians would march on the Republic's territory. To the west, the Greeks quickly occupied Cilicia and moved to bring Antioch itself under siege. While overwhelming numbers, and heavy losses, would allow the Assyrians to break this siege with victory of at the Battle of Marash, their enemies remained entrenched in Cilicia. To the north, the situation was notably more dire. Badly out-gunned and out-manned, the Assyrian army in Georgia was almost totally destroyed in a lightening Russian advance through the state. Indeed, there were few parts of the Republic were Assyrian rule was as shallow and unpopular as in Georgia, and the invading Russians were surprised at the breath of sympathy they found among the indigenous peoples of the country – drawing upon many to support their forces with guides and irregular troops. The Russians were only halted in a bloody engagement around Tbilisi in the Spring of 1834, with the situation on the front appearing troubling.
As news of Assyria's troubles spread around her dependencies and troops were redirected towards the Middle East, colonial unrest rose to the surface. Over December and January 1834 there were a series of uprisings by Malay nationalists across Sumatra and the Indies – seeking to restore the rule of traditional Muslim aristocracies at the expense of creoles and colonial administrations. Most of these rising were small scale affairs and easily quashed, however on peninsular Malaya the rebels were able to occupy the city of Malacca itself. Seeking the capitalise on this weakness and restore its own lost territories in the region, the Koreans would enter into an alliance with the rebels in Malacca and declare war on Assyria in February 1834.
With her armies on the defensive on the home front and war in the Indies, Assyria would be faced by one more great calamity in the flaring up of tensions once more in Al-Opheeria. Despite the crucial aid that the Republican government in Nineveh had given to the colony during its time of great need in the midst of the Zulu Rebellions, the creoles had been growing increasingly restive. The rise of the Republican Liberal Party and its steadfast opposition to slavery and the Al-Opheerians had caused severe anxiety in the colony. El-Issa's narrow election victory in 1832 had done little to quell these fears, with a future Liberal majority appearing a certainty in the future. With the Federal Republic under such strain in early 1834, the Al-Opheerians sought to seize their moment. The colonial assembly produced a petition in April with near universal backing from Al-Opheeria's native political groups, and importantly also possessing the endorsement of the commander of the local Assyrian military garrison, that demanded that Nineveh cede complete control over domestic affairs to the colonists.
Although the Liberal benches cried of traitors and demanded war to maintain the status quo, the Vizier's own supporters, and those of his Conservative allies in the Majlis, were filled with creole sympathisers who could not bear the thought of war against their colonial kinsmen. Instead, representatives of the government travelled to the Cape to negotiate. By the summer, they had agreed to a deal. Al-Opheeria, alongside the islands of the East African Littoral, would gain their nominal independence as a sister Republic, with complete authority over their own domestic affairs. However, Assyria would remain responsible for their defence, have control over their foreign affairs, manage their international customs and trade and possessing exclusive economic rights. Furthermore, the new Republic would be required to provide Nineveh with a portion of all gold exported from Al-Opheeria – ensuring a lucrative source of state income was not lost. The South African Republic was born with the final flurry of the decade-long South African Crisis.
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