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A Century of War
shareholder of Anglo-Persian, while the government’s own role in Anglo-Persian was kept secret. Reilly had thus secured Britain’s first major petroleum source. BY RAIL FROM BERLIN TO BAGHDAD In 1889, a group of German industrialists and bankers, led by Deutsche Bank, secured a concession from the Ottoman government to build a railway through Anatolia from the capitol, Constantinople. This accord was expanded ten years later, in 1899, when the Ottoman government gave the German group approval for the next stage of what became known as the Berlin–Baghdad railway project. The second agreement was one consequence of the 1898 visit to Constantinople by German Kaiser Wilhelm II. German–Turkish relations had become increasingly important over those ten years. Germany had decided to build a strong economic alliance with Turkey, beginning in the 1890s, as a way to develop potentially vast new markets to the East for the export of German industrial goods. The Berlin–Baghdad railway project was to be the centerpiece of a brilliant and quite workable economic strategy. Potential supplies of oil were lurking in the background and Britain stood opposed. The seeds of the animosities tragically being acted out in the Middle East from the 1990s to the present day trace directly back to this period. For more than two decades, the question of the construction of a modern railway linking Continental Europe with Baghdad was a point of friction at the center of German–English relations. By the estimation of Deutsche Bank director Karl Helfferich, the person responsible at the time for the Baghdad rail project negotiations, no other issue led to greater tension between London and Berlin in the decade and a half before 1914, with the possible exception of the issue of Germany’s growing naval fleet.4 In 1888, under the leadership of Deutsche Bank, a consortium secured a concession for the construction and maintenance of a railway connecting Haidar-Pascha, outside Constantinople, with Angora. The company was named the Anatolian Railway Company, and included Austrian and Italian shareholders as well as a small British shareholding. Work on the railway proceeded so well that the section was completed ahead of schedule and construction was further extended south to Konia. By 1896, a rail line was open from Berlin to Konia, deep in the Turkish interior of the Anatolian highlands, a stretch of some 1,000
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