1840-1847 The Pursuit of Liberty
While slavery had been legally abolished by the Assyrian Federal government in 1840, this did not lead to the immediate end of the institution. While slavery, passed with no dispute in Philistia, home to vanishingly few slaves in the first place, and was abolished with surprisingly little protest in traditionally conservative Egypt, the states around the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea proved more recalcitrant. For Babylonia, Arabia and Oman, slavery was the core foundation of the social and economic structure; its end could scarcely be imagined. The resistance to emancipation would be led by the state government of Babylonia. While the Conservatives, with their sabre rattling attitude towards abolition, were still a major force in Babylonia, the state government was under the control of the Moderates – who retained a foundation of respect for the laws and institutions of the Republic. They therefore sought to dispute emancipation on constitutional grounds – drawing on the centuries' old Federalist tradition of provincial autonomy to argue that Nineveh had no right to impose abolition on the states. With this defiant pose, the Babylonian Moderates succeeded in delaying the imposition of emancipation – hoping to overturn the Liberal majority in the upcoming midterm elections and in doing so put an end to their enemies abolitionist schemes.
Majlis Election Results, 1841
With emancipation still not fully implemented heading into the 1841 midterm elections, the election was dominated by this single issue. On the right, there was a resurgence of Conservative support, principally in Babylonia, which yielded modest parliamentary gains. At the same time the Liberals, denouncing the obfuscation and frustration of the will of the Majlis displayed by the Moderates, made crucial gains – increasing their parliamentary majority yet further and achieving the third highest raw vote total ever seen in a Majlis election. Bleeding support on both sides, the Moderates lost a significant share of their vote and only narrowly averted a more drastic drop in the seat tally. Naimy and the Liberals were triumphant.
The decisive Liberal Republican victory in the 1841 elections effectively ended the hopes of a legalistic root to resisting emancipation. Naimy, with the radicals in his own party at his back, threatened to deploy the Federal Army to free the slaves. With the Moderate-controlled government of Babylonia obfuscating over this threat, a cabal of reactionary latifundia rose the grand old flag of anti-Republican monarchist rebellion – raising ten thousand fighters and marching on Basra. With the provincial government unwilling to surrender power to the rebels, the monarchists struggled to gain traction. Lacking the support of defectors from the military, failing to capture Basra – the greatest of slave cities – owing to fire power of battleships off shore, and soon locked into battles with Muslim militias in the countryside – the rebellion was a fiasco from the start. With the arrival of Federal troops, within six months the rebels had been crushed and order restored in Babylonia.
In the period that followed, Babylonia would endure a two year military occupation during which the end of slavery was enforced upon the province – although the freed Blacks would largely remain in the countryside as farm labourers of their former masters. Beyond Babylonia, the picture was rather different. Fearing military intervention, the administrations of Oman, Socotra and Arabia all accepted the legal end of slavery. In Oman and Socotra, the Blacks moved almost seamlessly from one form of peonage to another – with administrations placing significant legal restrictions on former slaves that would force them to remain in the employ of their former masters and restrict their freedoms. In Arabia, much of the state was virtually a law unto itself where the reach of the state had little impact. There, the clans of the desert were free to largely ignore the proclamations of Nineveh and even the provincial administration in Medina.
While Assyria faced its own period of internal unrest, the Balkans were aflame in a far bloodier conflict. The Byzantine Empire was home to a great many peoples who chafed under Constantinople authoritarian absolutism. In 1839, a series of uprisings had broken out across the Balkans – involving Serbs, Vlachs and Bulgarians. Seizing control over the Danube and great swathes of land to its south, the rebels were a serious threat to Imperial authority, and the Greek military would strike back with a gruesome campaign of massacre and destruction in the early 1840s. Seeing an opportunity to needle an ancient foe and bolster Assyria's international standing, in 1841 the Vizier began to openly proclaim Assyrian support for the rebels – and smuggle weapons to support them through Albania. In 1842, the situation would escalate further after the Byzantines blockaded the small Balkan Republic and Assyria responded by sending its warships to escort convoys of arms heading for Vlore.
With both the Italians and Chernigovians open to a resumption of the Ragusan War that had only concluded seven years previously, conflict seemed inevitable. However, the Scots and Germans were very much opposed. The Scots had grown increasingly close to Constantinople over the past decade – seeing in them an important check on Assyrian power that could deny them a free hand in the Indian Ocean, where their own influence was growing, while barring them from stretching their tentacles into Europe. Meanwhile, the Germans, although long friendly with their fellow Republicans in Nineveh, had no desire to throw fuel on the fire of nationalism in their own Balkan backyard. Edinburgh and Frankfurt therefore undertook an intervention – organising a conference in Rome that saw the competing parties resolve their differences diplomatically. The Byzantines offered largely ceremonial concessions to offer a less bloodthirsty response to their restive rebels, while also agreeing to cooperation with Assyria in managing cross-border Cuman raiding. Overall, the affair did little more than save face for Assyria as the Republic was forced to back down rather than risk retribution from the Scots and alienation from Germany.
Assyria's shirking of international conflict was in part based upon the fragility of its own economic position as the early 1840s saw it slump into a deep recession. The forces that battered the Assyrian economy were multifaceted – based on harvests, the vagaries of capitalist over expansion and international markets. In a society that remained a predominantly agricultural and subsistence based, a succession of relatively poor harvests in these years had devastating impacts – leading to sporadic food and raw material shortages, price rises and an outward migration from the cities to the countryside as many sought greater food security in rural areas, thereby leaving behind labour shortages in the cities. The agricultural crisis was only worsened by the dislocation associated with the end of slavery and the violence that had accompanied it in Babylonia – home to some of the most productive lands in the Republic, with its plantation-style economy.
Industries that had enjoyed strong growth in the 1830s, during which time they had been the motors of the first stages of Assyria's industrialisation, were badly hit. Steel and iron saw drops in production in the region of 10%, while the arms industry saw output fall by half between 1840 and 1843 following the resolution of the Bulgarian crisis.
Perhaps most significant was the demise of the textiles. Egypt had emerged as a key player in the Mediterranean economy with the development of its vibrant cotton production. While predominantly an exporters, to largely Italian buyers, in the 1830s Egypt had emerged as the fastest growing part of the Assyrian economy on the back of a growing domestic textiles industry. In an economy that had grown ever more open to foreign imports under the Liberal Republicans, these emerging Egyptian mills had enjoyed only very thin profit margins at the best of times and were swept away by the recession of the early 1840s, with Assyria's total textile production dropping to less than two thirds of its 1830 level at its low point in 1842 before recovering somewhat – albeit to a far lower base than it had enjoyed at the start of the decade.
Ninth Vizieral Election Results, 1844
Majlis Election Results, 1844
The weak economic picture provided the backdrop for a difficult re-election campaign for the incumbent Liberal Republican Vizier, Naimy, entering his fourth consecutive Vizieral contest. Despite the ructions of abolition and the Babylonian revolt, the Moderates had emerged from the crisis united and stronger than ever – credited for their resistance to the Liberals, but also their legal approach. This aided them in cannibalising Conservative support – sending their once mighty rivals towards a handful of holdouts – while at the same time holding to the centre ground and benefiting from exhaustion with Naimy's government. This recipe was enough to bring the Moderates to the very cusp of victory – falling short by scarcely believable margins. In the Vizieral contest, the Moderate candidate, an energetic Syriac industrialist Ephrem Midyat, came within six and a half thousand votes of unseating the first ever Liberal Vizier. In the Majlis, the Moderates saw a heavy swing in their favour, powered by the collapsing Conservative vote, that saw them reach within five seats of an outright majority and one behind the Liberal Republicans – thereby bringing an end to six years of Liberal control in the Majlis. The Conservatives, alienated from the masses by their violent and failed response to emancipation, were an increasingly defensive and embittered rump of their former glory.
In the years since the victory in the abolitionist struggle, Assyrian Liberalism had been changing. While many, particularly around the Vizier, saw their core reformist mission largely at an end, the militant backbencher faction who had held Naimy's feet to the fire over slavery remained unsatisfied. These hardline Liberals called themselves the Dawronoye – taking the name of the insurrectionist cells that had fought against Malik Abaya's power during the December Massacres. They saw themselves as the true carriers of the flame of the Assyrian Revolution and the radical constitution of 1742 – supporting universal manhood suffrage, equal treatment for the Blacks, land reform and a strictly secular state.
One of the key axes upon which liberal hardliners would define themselves on would be religion. Although the eighteenth century Assyrian Republic had been fairly secular state, the role of religion had steadily risen since the 1780s with the annexation of devout Lower Egypt and the reconciliation with the traditionalist Church of the East. Under the leadership of self-confident and assertive leaderships, religiously conservative clerical leaderships in Catholic Lower Egypt and Philistia, Nestorian Mesopotamia and Islamic Upper Egypt, Arabia and Oman had intertwined themselves closely with the state – placing their symbols, ideology and political influence into the heart of government, courts and administration. Only in Syria, Armenia and the Caucuses was religious influence kept in check. For many Liberals, this represented another element of Moderate-led rightwing backsliding away from the ideal of the Revolution, even as few in the leadership of the Liberal Republicans dared involve themselves in a direct confrontation with the Churches and Mosques.
However, the central feature of the radical liberals agenda was the question of suffrage. Since 1752, Assyria had possessed a very stable and limited franchise based on men of property. For nine decades of Moderate ascendancy, this status quo had never been seriously challenges. Yet throughout this time the 1742 constitution, with its mass franchise, had been a touchstone for generations of Liberals who now saw that their time had come to restore it. Naimy, coming from a Moderate tradition, was very wary of a revolutionary shift towards a mass electorate and sought to resist it as best he could. Nonetheless, with divides within the Liberal Republicans growing, a compromise position was sought. The party would stand on a programme calling for a significant extension of the electorate in the up coming midterm elections, although the right to vote would remain restricted by a wealth-qualification.
After a low point earlier in the decade, the mid-1840s saw the beginning of a dramatic upswing in Assyrian economic fortunes. Central to this were bountiful cotton harvests on the Nile, which produced a glut of cheap cotton and facilitated both a revival of Egyptian mills that had fallen away in previous years and a scattering of new textile workshops in the Levant – principally in the great Syrian cities. Between 1845 and 1847, Assyrian textile production doubled – reaching its highest ever level. Elsewhere, the steel and iron production that was the cornerstone of the other major centre of Assyrian industry in Armenia and northern Assyria-Superior witnessed even more imposing growth as steel production rose two and a half fold in the same period between 1845 and 1847. While other manufacturing sectors performed much less spectacularly, there was a wider stabilisation of agriculture – with Babylonia in particular recovering from the worst of its crisis at the start of the decade, even if it remained much weakened by the end of slavery.
Majlis Election Results, 1847
Standing on its most clear and radical political programme since the abolitionist debates a decades before, the Liberal Republican Party restored its parliamentary majority with an exceptional performance that saw its Majlis vote soar to an absolute majority for the first time. Although the Conservatives remained a shadow of their former selves, they nonetheless experienced a very modest recovery. Despite now dominating the traditionally ascendant centre and right wing of Assyrian politics, the Moderates lost a great many of the seats they had gained three years previously. Entering his final Majlis term as Vizier, nine years into his premiership, Naimy now had a mandate to transform the static landscape of Assyrian politics for good.
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