By rail from Berlin to Baghdad

shareholder of Anglo-Persian, while the government’s own role in Anglo-Persian was kept secret. Reilly had thus secured Britain’s fi rst 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 fl eet.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

kilometers of new rail in a space of less than eight years in an economically desolate area. It was a true engineering and construction accomplishment. The ancient rich valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers was coming into sight of a modern transportation infrastructure. Hitherto, the only rail infrastructure built in the Middle East had been British or French, all of it extremely short stretches in Syria or elsewhere to link key port cities, but never to open up large expanses of interior to modern industrialization.

For the first time, the railway gave Constantinople and the Ottoman Empire a vital modern economic linkage with its entire Asiatic interior. The rail link, once extended to Baghdad and a short distance further to Kuwait, would provide the cheapest and fastest link between Europe and the entire Indian subcontinent, a world rail link of the fi rst order.

From the British side, this was exactly the point. ‘If “Berlin–Baghdad” were achieved, a huge block of territory producing every kind of economic wealth, and unassailable by sea-power would be united under German authority,’ warned R.G.D. Laffan, at that time a senior British military adviser attached to the Serbian Army. ‘Russia would be cut off by this barrier from her western friends, Great Britain and France,’ Laffan added.

German and Turkish armies would be within easy striking distance of our Egyptian interests, and from the Persian Gulf, our Indian Empire would be threatened. The port of Alexandretta and the control of the Dardanelles would soon give Germany enormous naval power in the Mediterranean.

Laffan hinted at the British strategy to sabotage the Berlin–Baghdad link.

A glance at the map of the world will show how the chain of States stretched from Berlin to Baghdad. The German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Bulgaria, Turkey. One little strip of territory alone blocked the way and prevented the two ends of the chain from being linked together. That little strip was Serbia. Serbia stood small but defi ant between Germany and the great ports of Constantinople and Salonika, holding the Gate of the East … Serbia was really the fi rst line of defense of our eastern possessions. If she were crushed or enticed into the ‘Berlin–Baghdad’ system, then

our vast but slightly defended empire would soon have felt the shock of Germany’s eastward thrust.’ [emphasis added]5

Thus it is not surprising to find enormous unrest and wars throughout the Balkans in the decade before 1914, including the Turkish War, the Bulgarian War and continuous unrest in the region. Conveniently enough, the confl ict and wars helped weaken the Berlin–Constantinople alliance, and especially the completion of the Berlin–Baghdad rail link, just as Laffan had urged. But it would be a mistake to view the construction of the Berlin–Baghdad railway project as a unilateral German move against Britain. Germany repeatedly sought British cooperation in the project. From the 1890s, when agreement was reached with the Turkish government to complete a fi nal 2,500 kilometer stretch of rail which would complete the line down to what is today Kuwait, Deutsche Bank and the Berlin government made countless attempts to secure British participation and cofi nancing of the enormous project.

In November 1899, following his visit to Constantinople, Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II met with Britain’s Queen Victoria in Windsor Castle, to personally intercede in favor of soliciting a signifi cant British participation in the Baghdad project. Germany knew well that Britain asserted interests in the Persian Gulf and Suez in defense of her India passage, as it was known. Without positive British backing, it was clear that the project would face great diffi culties, not least political and fi nancial. The size of the fi nal leg of the railway was beyond the resources of German banks, even one as large as Deutsche Bank, to fi nance alone.

From its side, however, for the next 15 years Britain sought with every device known, to delay and obstruct progress of the railway, while always holding out the hope of ultimate agreement to keep the German side off balance. This game lasted until the outbreak of war in August 1914.

But the trump card which Her Royal Britannic Majesty played in the fi nal phase of the negotiations around the Baghdad railway was her ties with the Sheikh of Kuwait. In 1901, British warships off the Kuwait coast dictated to the Turkish government that henceforth they must consider the Gulf port located just below the Shaat alArab, controlled by the Anaza tribe of Sheikh Mubarak al-Sabah, to be a ‘British protectorate.’

Turkey was at that point too economically and militarily weak to do other than feebly protest the de facto British occupation of this

distant part of the Ottoman Empire. Kuwait in British hands blocked successful completion of the Berlin–Baghdad railway from important eventual access to the Persian Gulf waters and beyond.

In 1907, Sheikh Mubarak al-Sabah, a ruthless sort who reportedly seized power in the region in 1896 by murdering his two half-brothers as they slept in his palace, was persuaded to sign over, in the form of a ‘lease in perpetuity,’ the land of Bander Shwaikh to ‘the precious Imperial British Government.’ The document was co-signed by Major C.G. Knox, Political Agent of the Imperial British Government in Kuwait. There were reportedly generous portions of British gold and rifl es to make the signing more palatable to the sheikh. By October, 1913, Lieutenant Colonel Sir Percy Cox had secured from the everobliging sheikh a letter wherein the sheikh agreed not to grant any concession for development of oil in the land ‘to anyone other than a person nominated and recommended by the British government.’6

By 1902 it was known that the region of the Ottoman Empire known as Mesopotamia—today Iraq and Kuwait—contained resources of petroleum; how much and how accessible was still a matter for speculation. This discovery shaped the gigantic battle for global economic and military control which continues to the present day.

In 1912, Deutsche Bank, in the course of its fi nancing of the Baghdad rail connection, negotiated a concession from the Ottoman emperor giving the Baghdad Rail Co. full ‘right-of-way’ rights to all oil and minerals on a parallel 20 kilometers either side of the rail line. The line had reached as far as Mosul in what today is Iraq.

By 1912, German industry and government had realized that oil was the fuel of its economic future, not only for land transport but for naval vessels. At that time, Germany was itself locked in the grip of the large American Rockefeller Standard Oil Company trust. Standard Oil’s Deutsche Petroleums Verkaufgesellschaft controlled 91 per cent of all German oil sales. Deutsche Bank held a minority 9 per cent share of Deutsche Petroleums Verkaufgesellschaft, hardly a decisive interest. Germany in 1912 had no independent, secure supply of oil.

But geologists had discovered oil in that part of Mesopotamia today called Iraq, between Mosul and Baghdad. The projected line of the last part of the Berlin–Baghdad rail link would go right through the area believed to hold large oil reserves.

Efforts to pass legislation in the Berlin Reichstag in 1912–13 to establish a German state-owned company to develop and run the new found oil resources independently of the American Rockefeller