The road across the high mountains, though improved, long remained
inadequate for the transportation of large quantities of goods. The
political situation there was not stabilized until the middle of the cen-
tury. There was some travel between Astrakhan and Baku but very
little between Baku and Tbilisi. Russia could not even begin to develop
a route linking Tbilisi with Russia via the Black Sea until the Otto-
man Empire gave up its claim to the west Caucasian coast in 1829.
As a result, it cost less for an Iranian merchant to buy goods from
Russia via Ottoman markets than from Tbilisi. That city enjoyed a
temporary boom during the early 1820s while Iran and the Ottoman
Empire were at war, but after 1823 trade reverted to the usual routes
and the boom ended.
In agriculture, the picture seems to have been fairly bright, although
not in ElizavetpoP or Qarabagh, which suffered the greatest war dam-
age. Elsewhere agricultural production increased substantially after
1813, although still within the context of traditional methods of pro-
duction and parameters of good harvests. Russian authorities made a
few efforts to introduce new crops (such as sugar cane in Talesh) and
new technology (such as improving silk-spinning machines in Shirvan),
but these did not progress beyond the experimental stage in the first
few decades of Russian rule.
7
In the years after 1813, some members of the Iranian government
became increasingly distressed about the ramifications of the Russian
gains embodied in the Treaty of Golestan. One ominous symptom of
the damage to the shah's prestige was the rebellion of the governor of
Astarabad in 1813. That particular problem was resolved speedily,
but there were other challenges to the authority of the central govern-
ment over the next few years. Moreover, the government found that
its dealings with Britain and Russia produced fewer advantages than
expected. 'Abbas Mirza was especially concerned that the loss to
Russia would jeopardize his chance of succeeding to the throne. At
the same time, various British and Russian officials were dissatisfied
with the state of affairs in Iran.
Fath 'Ali Shah had been encouraged by Ouseley and Rtishchev to
hope that the humiliating territorial concessions in the Treaty of Go-
lestan would not be permanent, that Russia would restore some of
the territory to which the shah had formally waived all claims. Such
was not to be the case. When Mirza Abu'l-Hasan was sent on an em-
bassy to St. Petersburg in 1814 to mark the establishment of peace
between Iran and Russia, the Russian government did not use the oc-
casion to make any territorial concessions. For the next dozen years,
there were attempts to negotiate a mutually acceptable definition of
152 The Consequences of the Struggle