State building, defensive modernisation, and internal colonisation: the case of the Swedish-led gendarmerie in Persia 1911-1916
This project will investigate the Swedish-led gendarmerie in Persia (Iran) as a case of state building through defensive modernisation (weaker state modernises its institutions to resist stronger states). The gendarmerie in Persia illustrates Swedish participation in this process and the personal records of the Swedish officers can help us map a wide spectre of approaches, from (military) orientalism to empathy.
The gendarmerie the Swedish officers helped build and lead (1911-1916) was meant to uphold law and order in the provinces. It became part of a long series of attempts to discipline the tribes - considered an anomaly in the modernisation of Persia. The projection of state power throughout the country through its representatives and their performative tasks is part of an internal colonisation of the country. The gendarmerie was to act as high way policemen, but got involved in other institutional/performative aspects of a modern state.
The primary source material is the personal archives of the Swedish officers, the archives of the Swedish Foreign Ministry and the Iranian parliament. The former contain private correspondence, military communications, diaries, and a large number of photographs.
The project will contribute to our knowledge of Iranian politics in early twentieth century and situate Sweden within a global history of colonialism.
Final report
State building, defensive modernisation, and internal colonisation: the case of the Swedish-led gendarmerie in Persia 1911-1916
Execution
The aim of the project was to make the most of the Swedish material available on the Gendarmerie as this material is by far the most comprehensive set of archival documents pertaining to the Gendarmerie during its "Swedish" phase. This includes private letters, official documents, photographs, and diaries.
In addition the aim was also to investigate Russian, British and German sources. Due to the COVID-pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, access to Russian material was not possible. The German Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Auswärtige Amt) archives were investigated and the British ones were available online.
I presented the project and some preliminary results at a seminar at Princeton University in May 2019. The major international conference where I presented more elaborate findings was the Association for Iranian Studies in Salamanca (originally scheduled for 2020 but delayed to 2022). I organised a panel, "The encroaching state? Modernisation and resistance in late Qajar/early Pahlavi Iran", where I and two colleagues explored various aspects of this perspective.
Project purpose and results
By investigating the Swedish-led gendarmerie in Persia the project seeks to contribute to the literature on state-building and modernisation in Iran in the early 20th century. As the Swedes constituted the core group of officers tasked with building and directing the gendarmerie the specificities of their group dynamic and background was also of particular interest. This domino like dynamic of institution building took place within a context of Great Power rivalry in Iran, as well as the tensions between the political centre and the power brokers and tribes in the provinces.
Thus the gendarmerie was an institutional response to several inter-connected problems: [1] The need for the Persian state to safeguard its sovereignty viz. encroaching European Great Powers (specifically Great Britain and Russia). This encroachment came in a political form, e.g. influencing politics, building relations with local power brokers behind the back of the central state. But it was also about money, the funds that the central state lacked and borrowed from Russia and Britain, thus putting itself at their mercy, and the ambition of London and St. Petersburg to penetrate the Iranian market. All of this came together in the need to establish greater control over the provinces in the name of the central government, thus opening a veritable hornet's nest in terms of local de facto autonomy and the interconnections between powerful tribal leaders and noble men who where also present and represented in the capital and at the court.
This required a more coherent and stable form of governance in the country and the Gendarmerie was one piece in this puzzle. Yet because it was in many ways one of the most modern institutions in a system that had not yet transitioned far enough down that road it was very much left to its own devices. This also meant more freedom of action, both for the institution as well as the Swedish officers that commanded it. As there were only approximately 20 Swedes in the service at any given point in time, they as individuals had more sway then what is usual in a military institution. Their individual behaviour and (inter)actions with the local population thus played a significant role in their ability to conduct operations and navigate local politics. Some of them took to Iran, while others saw it as a colonial adventure, where their contractual legal immunity allowed them to use violence in ways that directly violated their own rules and regulations (e.g. torture and abuse).
The Gendarmerie did manage to establish a geographically fairly wide ranging network of posts and control the main highways in the southern part of the country. This was not done without friction, skirmishes and outright battles were fought with tribes and bands of brigands who were part of the local tapestry as it were. At times the relations with the tribes had as much to do with their relationships with the powers that be in Tehran. By virtue of their superior fire power, where they could, the Gendarmerie established themselves as the main if not sole institution with the ability to use violence.
In the end their relative success was also partly their undoing. Outright success meant establishing and enhancing the sway and influence of the central government, something that eventually would threaten the kind of influence that Great Britain and Russia could only exert unencumbered in its absence. This increasing tension with Britain in the southern part of the country was subsumed in the havoc of the outbreak of World War I. The Swedes were generally anti-Russian and pro-German. While the former inclination tended to ingratiate them with the Brits, the latter sentiment was incompatible with the political and literal battle lines of the Great War. The Gendarmerie split and as most Swedes were ordered home by the Swedish government, the remaining officers had to abide by British decisions. Eventually the Swedish contingent left and the Gendarmerie was incorporated into a British outfit, the South Persia Rifles.
The diplomatic interplay is also important in this regard and various documents and notes in several archives attest to this. The Swedes, and General H.Hjalmarsson, the person in charge of the Gendarmerie, in particular, had to conduct a balancing act that had as much to do with European Great Power rivalry writ large as it had with the Gendarmerie's business at hand.
The other part of their undoing was the constant lack of funds for a project which in effect amounted to having a standing para-military force, numbering in the thousands, constantly in operation. The Persian treasury did not have the means to sustain this operation and the Swedes were constantly busy deferring institutional bankruptcy through pleas to the Persian government, monetising confiscated contraband, and collecting taxes.
It is difficult to see how the Swedish-led project could have achieved anymore than it actually did considering these structural and political constraints. As an example of impromptu state-building using European officers with all the colonial trappings this entails, it displays all the classical deficiencies of such projects. Lack of funds, political power differentials, and the inability of the instigators and executioners of the project to show the local population how upending the old order would, eventually, benefit them. The last element might institutionally seem the least consequential, but is in fact crucial for long term success, absent constant military supremacy. The "rebelliousness" of the local population, their unwillingness to cooperate with this "exogenous " force (central government), combined with a lack of a political process that establishes the legitimacy of the gendarmerie as part of the local political-legal system, was the single most important hurdle that such a project would have needed to overcome.
This being said, it is clear that both institutionally and personally the project left its mark. Both among the Swedes and the Iranians involved the experience had lasting effect, and the Gendarmerie was resurrected after the establishment of the Pahlavi monarchy. The Gendarmerie remained independent institution until 1991 when it was integrated into the overall domestic law enforcement forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
New questions
The results of the project point in several directions. The most immediate new research question is very difficult to answer and pertains to how the Gendarmerie was perceived by local power brokers and tribes. This can to a small degree be gleaned from second hand sources, but a more in depth investigation is difficult without written sources. A corollary to this issue would be to explore the road taxes that local power brokers and tribes levied illegally on merchants and other travellers as a form of competing nascent local authority and autonomy. Another avenue would be a more fully fledged comparison with similar cases to investigate if the sources of failure/success in the projects are similar. Here the main variables to compare would be would be the level of political support centrally and locally, financial solvency, and the role of foreign actors.
Dissemination
The website for the project is being updated and a book proposal has been submitted to Oxford University Press/Hurst Publishers. The proposal for an exhibition about the Gendarmerie has ben submitted to a Swedish museum.
Execution
The aim of the project was to make the most of the Swedish material available on the Gendarmerie as this material is by far the most comprehensive set of archival documents pertaining to the Gendarmerie during its "Swedish" phase. This includes private letters, official documents, photographs, and diaries.
In addition the aim was also to investigate Russian, British and German sources. Due to the COVID-pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, access to Russian material was not possible. The German Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Auswärtige Amt) archives were investigated and the British ones were available online.
I presented the project and some preliminary results at a seminar at Princeton University in May 2019. The major international conference where I presented more elaborate findings was the Association for Iranian Studies in Salamanca (originally scheduled for 2020 but delayed to 2022). I organised a panel, "The encroaching state? Modernisation and resistance in late Qajar/early Pahlavi Iran", where I and two colleagues explored various aspects of this perspective.
Project purpose and results
By investigating the Swedish-led gendarmerie in Persia the project seeks to contribute to the literature on state-building and modernisation in Iran in the early 20th century. As the Swedes constituted the core group of officers tasked with building and directing the gendarmerie the specificities of their group dynamic and background was also of particular interest. This domino like dynamic of institution building took place within a context of Great Power rivalry in Iran, as well as the tensions between the political centre and the power brokers and tribes in the provinces.
Thus the gendarmerie was an institutional response to several inter-connected problems: [1] The need for the Persian state to safeguard its sovereignty viz. encroaching European Great Powers (specifically Great Britain and Russia). This encroachment came in a political form, e.g. influencing politics, building relations with local power brokers behind the back of the central state. But it was also about money, the funds that the central state lacked and borrowed from Russia and Britain, thus putting itself at their mercy, and the ambition of London and St. Petersburg to penetrate the Iranian market. All of this came together in the need to establish greater control over the provinces in the name of the central government, thus opening a veritable hornet's nest in terms of local de facto autonomy and the interconnections between powerful tribal leaders and noble men who where also present and represented in the capital and at the court.
This required a more coherent and stable form of governance in the country and the Gendarmerie was one piece in this puzzle. Yet because it was in many ways one of the most modern institutions in a system that had not yet transitioned far enough down that road it was very much left to its own devices. This also meant more freedom of action, both for the institution as well as the Swedish officers that commanded it. As there were only approximately 20 Swedes in the service at any given point in time, they as individuals had more sway then what is usual in a military institution. Their individual behaviour and (inter)actions with the local population thus played a significant role in their ability to conduct operations and navigate local politics. Some of them took to Iran, while others saw it as a colonial adventure, where their contractual legal immunity allowed them to use violence in ways that directly violated their own rules and regulations (e.g. torture and abuse).
The Gendarmerie did manage to establish a geographically fairly wide ranging network of posts and control the main highways in the southern part of the country. This was not done without friction, skirmishes and outright battles were fought with tribes and bands of brigands who were part of the local tapestry as it were. At times the relations with the tribes had as much to do with their relationships with the powers that be in Tehran. By virtue of their superior fire power, where they could, the Gendarmerie established themselves as the main if not sole institution with the ability to use violence.
In the end their relative success was also partly their undoing. Outright success meant establishing and enhancing the sway and influence of the central government, something that eventually would threaten the kind of influence that Great Britain and Russia could only exert unencumbered in its absence. This increasing tension with Britain in the southern part of the country was subsumed in the havoc of the outbreak of World War I. The Swedes were generally anti-Russian and pro-German. While the former inclination tended to ingratiate them with the Brits, the latter sentiment was incompatible with the political and literal battle lines of the Great War. The Gendarmerie split and as most Swedes were ordered home by the Swedish government, the remaining officers had to abide by British decisions. Eventually the Swedish contingent left and the Gendarmerie was incorporated into a British outfit, the South Persia Rifles.
The diplomatic interplay is also important in this regard and various documents and notes in several archives attest to this. The Swedes, and General H.Hjalmarsson, the person in charge of the Gendarmerie, in particular, had to conduct a balancing act that had as much to do with European Great Power rivalry writ large as it had with the Gendarmerie's business at hand.
The other part of their undoing was the constant lack of funds for a project which in effect amounted to having a standing para-military force, numbering in the thousands, constantly in operation. The Persian treasury did not have the means to sustain this operation and the Swedes were constantly busy deferring institutional bankruptcy through pleas to the Persian government, monetising confiscated contraband, and collecting taxes.
It is difficult to see how the Swedish-led project could have achieved anymore than it actually did considering these structural and political constraints. As an example of impromptu state-building using European officers with all the colonial trappings this entails, it displays all the classical deficiencies of such projects. Lack of funds, political power differentials, and the inability of the instigators and executioners of the project to show the local population how upending the old order would, eventually, benefit them. The last element might institutionally seem the least consequential, but is in fact crucial for long term success, absent constant military supremacy. The "rebelliousness" of the local population, their unwillingness to cooperate with this "exogenous " force (central government), combined with a lack of a political process that establishes the legitimacy of the gendarmerie as part of the local political-legal system, was the single most important hurdle that such a project would have needed to overcome.
This being said, it is clear that both institutionally and personally the project left its mark. Both among the Swedes and the Iranians involved the experience had lasting effect, and the Gendarmerie was resurrected after the establishment of the Pahlavi monarchy. The Gendarmerie remained independent institution until 1991 when it was integrated into the overall domestic law enforcement forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
New questions
The results of the project point in several directions. The most immediate new research question is very difficult to answer and pertains to how the Gendarmerie was perceived by local power brokers and tribes. This can to a small degree be gleaned from second hand sources, but a more in depth investigation is difficult without written sources. A corollary to this issue would be to explore the road taxes that local power brokers and tribes levied illegally on merchants and other travellers as a form of competing nascent local authority and autonomy. Another avenue would be a more fully fledged comparison with similar cases to investigate if the sources of failure/success in the projects are similar. Here the main variables to compare would be would be the level of political support centrally and locally, financial solvency, and the role of foreign actors.
Dissemination
The website for the project is being updated and a book proposal has been submitted to Oxford University Press/Hurst Publishers. The proposal for an exhibition about the Gendarmerie has ben submitted to a Swedish museum.