Turkey, the Great Powers, and the Bagdad Railway: A study in imperialism

by Edward Mead Earle

A Golden Opportunity Presents Itself to the Entente Powers

The Young Turk revolutions of 1908 and 1909, which ended the reign of Abdul Hamid in the Ottoman Empire, offered France and Great Britain an unprecedented opportunity to assume moral and political leadership in the Near East. Many members of the Committee of Union and Progress, the revolutionary party, had been educated in western European universities—chiefly in Paris—and had come to be staunch admirers of French and English institutions. “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” the slogan of Republican France, became the watch-cry of the new era in Turkey. Parliamentary government and ministerial responsibility under a constitutional monarch, the political contribution of Britain to Western civilization, became the aim of the reformers at Constantinople. The Ottoman Empire was to be modernized politically, industrially, and socially according to the best of western European traditions.[1]

Into this scheme of things German influence fitted not at all. From the Young Turk point of view the Kaiser was an autocrat who not only had blocked democratic reform in Germany, but also had propped up the tottering regime of Abdul Hamid and thus had aided suppression of liberalism in the Ottoman Empire. As for Baron Marschall von Bieberstein, he had hobnobbed with the ex-Sultan and was considered as much a representative of the old order of things as Abdul Hamid himself. As Dr. Rohrbach described the situation, “the Young Turks, liberals of every shade, believed that Germany had been a staunch supporter of Abdul Hamid’s tyrannical government and that the German influence constituted a decided danger for the era of liberalism. That thought was zealously supported by the English and French press in Constantinople. The Young Turkish liberalism showed in the beginning a decided leaning toward a certain form of Anglomania. England, the home of liberty, of parliaments, of popular government—such were the catch phrases promulgated in the daily papers.”[2]

German prestige suffered still further because of the unseemly conduct of Germany’s allies toward the Young Turk Government. The revolution of 1908 was less than three months old when Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina. Almost simultaneously, Ferdinand of Bulgaria—presumably at the instigation and with the connivance of Austria—declared the independence of Bulgaria from the Sultan and assumed for himself the title of tsar. To cap the climax, Italy was intriguing in Tripoli and Cyrenaica with a view to the eventual seizure of those provinces. Baron Marschall found it impossible to explain away these hostile moves of the allies of Germany, and he protested vehemently against the failure of the Foreign Office at Berlin to restrain Austria-Hungary and Italy. He warned Prince von Bülow that vigorous action must be taken if Germany’s influence in the Near East were not to be totally destroyed.[3]

The decline of German prestige at Constantinople could not have been without effect upon the Bagdad Railway and the other activities of the Deutsche Bank. The Bagdad enterprise, in fact, was looked upon as a concrete manifestation of German hegemony at the Sublime Porte and as the crowning achievement of the friendship of those two autocrats of the autocrats, Abdul Hamid and William II. As such, it was certain to draw the fire of the reformers. The concession of 1903 had never been published in Turkey. Only fifty copies had been printed, and these had been distributed only among high officials of the Palace, the Sublime Porte, and the Ministries of War, Marine, and Public Works. It was generally supposed by the Union and Progress party, therefore, that the summaries published in the European press were limited to what the Sultan chose to make public. “The secrecy which thus enveloped the Bagdad Railway concession gave rise to the conviction that the contract contained, apart from detrimental financial and economic clauses, provisions which endangered the political independence of the State.”[4] And Young Turks were determined to tolerate no such additional limitations on the sovereignty of their country.

The opening, in the autumn of 1908, of the first parliament under the constitutional regime in Turkey gave the opponents of the Bagdad Railway their chance. A bitter attack on the project—in which hardly a single provision of the contract of 1903 escaped scathing criticism—was delivered by Ismail Hakki Bey, representative from Bagdad, editor of foreign affairs for a well-known reform journal, and a prominent member of the Union and Progress party. Hakki Bey denounced the Railway as a political and economic monstrosity which could have been possible only under an autocratic and corrupt government; in any event, he believed, it could have no place in the New Turkey. He proposed complete repudiation of the existing contracts with the Deutsche Bank. In this proposal he received considerable support from other members of the parliament.

An equally ringing, but more reasoned, speech was delivered by the talented Djavid Bey, subsequently to become Young Turk Minister of Finance. He agreed that the concession of 1903 infringed upon the economic and administrative independence of the Ottoman Empire; he condemned the scheme of kilometric guarantees as an unwarranted and indefensible drain upon the Treasury; he denounced the preponderance of strategic over business considerations in the construction of the line; he made it plain that he had no wish to see the extension of German influence in Turkey. He believed that the Bagdad concession should be revised in the interest of Ottoman finance and Ottoman sovereignty. But there must be no repudiation. “We must accept the Bagdad Railway contract, because there should exist a continuity and a solidarity between generations and governments. If a revolutionary government remains true to the obligations of its predecessor—even if those obligations be contracted by a government of the worst and most despotic kind—it will arouse among foreigners admiration of the moral sense of the nation and will accordingly increase public confidence. Just now, more than at any other time in our history, we Turks need the confidence of the world.” Everything should be done to effect a revision of the Bagdad Railway concession, however, and a firm resolve should be taken never again to commit the nation to such an engagement.

The anti-German and pro-Entente proclivities of the Young Turks were expressed in tangible ways. In 1909, for example, the Ottoman Navy was placed under the virtual command of a British admiral, and British officers continued to exercise comprehensive powers of administration over the ships and yards almost to the declaration of war in 1914. In 1909, also, Sir Ernest Cassel accepted an invitation to establish the National Bank of Turkey, for the purpose of promoting more generous investment of British capital in the Ottoman Empire. During the same year Sir William Willcocks was appointed consulting engineer to the Minister of Public Works, and his plans for the irrigation of Mesopotamia were put into immediate operation. Sir Richard Crawford, a British financier, was appointed adviser to the Minister of Finance; a British barrister was made inspector-general of the Ministry of Justice; a member of the British consular service became inspector-general of the Home Office. Later, serious consideration was given to a proposal to invite Lord Milner to head a commission to suggest reforms in the political and economic administration of Anatolia. A French officer was made inspector-general of the gendarmerie. In June, 1910, a French company was awarded a valuable concession for the construction of a railway from Soma to Panderma, and the following year the lucrative contract for the telephone service in Constantinople was granted to an Anglo-French syndicate.[5]

The Young Turk Government likewise was desirous of doing everything possible to remove French and British objections to the construction of railways in the Ottoman Empire. With this end in view they prevailed upon Dr. von Gwinner to reopen negotiations with Sir Ernest Cassel regarding British participation in the Bagdad Railway, and they secured the consent of the Deutsche Bank to a rearrangement of the terms of the concession of 1903. The latter was to be undertaken in accordance with British wishes and with due regard to the financial situation of Turkey. This was followed up, on November 8, 1909, by a formal request of the Ottoman ambassador at London for a statement of the terms upon which the British Government would withdraw its diplomatic objections to the Bagdad enterprise. Simultaneously negotiations were initiated for “compensations” to French interests, represented by the Imperial Ottoman Bank.

Until the end of the year 1909, then, the political situation in the Ottoman Empire under the revolutionary government had been almost altogether to the advantage of the Entente Powers. During 1910, however, German prestige began to revive in the Near East, and by the spring of 1911 German influence in Turkey had won back its former preëminent position.