94 A Short History of the Middle East
insisted to the end on her stating a time-limit for her occupation,
and only yielded on Britain's undertaking not to alter the legal
status quo.1 In 1907 the Entente Cordiale was extended to include
Russia, whose prestige and sense of security had been abased by her
defeat in the Japanese War of 1904-5, and who was consequently
more ready to compromise with her long-standing British rival.
An Anglo-Russian Agreement was reached 'to obviate any cause
of misunderstanding in Persian affairs' and to delimit the Russian
and British sphcres-of-interest in North and South Persia respec-
tively, leaving a no-man's-land between them. The Russian
government acknowledged that Afghanistan lay within the
British sphere of influence, while Britain undertook not to en-
courage the Amir to take any action threatening Russia. The
Russian government 'explicitly stated that it did not deny Britain's
special interest' in the Persian Gulf. The Agreement has subse-
quently been severely criticized by political moralists as a cynical
partitioning of Persia, 'absolute respect for whose independence
and integrity' was declared to be the fundamental principle of the
two Powers; but the fact is that Persia had ceased to be a Great
Power since the time of Shah Abbas the Great, three hundred years
before; she had become a minor piece in the game of Great-Power
chess at the time of Napoleon; and had ceased to be effectively
independent since Russia imposed on her the Treaty of Turkman-
chai in 1828. In her weakness Persian politicians had been reduced
to playing off Britain and Russia against one another. The Agree-
ment did at least have the effect of temporarily reducing the tension
of Anglo-Russian rivalry in Persia; and it consolidated Britain's
position in South Persia, where British concessionaires at last
struck oil at Masjid-i-Sulaiman in 1908, actually after the directors
in London, disappointed by several years' efforts without results,
had cabled orders for the work to be abandoned. In 1909 the
Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. was formed with a capital of .£2,000,000,
the Shell Co. being the principal participant.
The 'Committee of Union and Progress' which made the
Young Turk Revolution of 1908 aimed at substituting a liberal
and constitutional government for the autocracy of Abdul Hamid,
and so looked initially for support to liberal and constitutional
Britain and France rather than to autocratic Germany. However,
the enthusiasm for liberalism and modernization was short-lived,
1 Round Table, December 1936,111,