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Title: The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan

Author: James Morier

Release Date: May 5, 2007 [EBook #21331]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ADVENTURES OF HAJJI BABA ***

Produced by James Tenison

THE ADVENTURES OF HAJJI BABA OF ISPAHAN

BY

JAMES MORIER

ILLUSTRATED BY H.R. MILLAR

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE HON. GEORGE CURZON, M.P.

MACMILLAN AND CO. LONDON AND NEW YORK

1895

All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION

In the first decade of the present century Persia was for a short time
the pivot of the Oriental interest of English and Indian statesmen.
But little known and scarcely visited during the preceding century,
it suddenly and simultaneously focussed the ambitions of Russia, the
apprehensions of Great Britain, the Asiatic schemes of France. The
envoys of great Powers flocked to its court, and vied with each other
in the magnificence of the display and the prodigality of the gifts with
which they sought to attract the superb graces of its sovereign,
Fath Ali Shah. Among these supplicants for the Persian alliance, then
appraised at much beyond its real value, the most assiduous and also the
most profuse were the British, agitated at one moment by the prospect of
an Afghan invasion of India, at another by the fear of an overland march
against Delhi of the combined armies of Napoleon and the Tsar. These
apprehensions were equally illusory; but while they lasted they supplied
the excuse for a constant stream of embassies, some from the British
sovereign, others from the viceregal court at Calcutta, and were
reproduced in a bewildering succession of Anglo-Persian Treaties. Sir
John Malcolm, Sir Harford Jones, Sir Gore Ouseley, and Sir Henry Ellis
were the plenipotentiaries who negotiated these several instruments; and
the principal coadjutor of the last three diplomats was James Justinian
Morier, the author of "Hajji Baba."

Born and nurtured in an Oriental atmosphere (though educated at Harrow),
he was one of three out of four sons, whom their father, himself