PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Copyright, 1923,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published July, 1923.
ReprintedJuly, 1924
Press of
J. J. Little & Ives Company
New York, U. S. A.
“When the history of the latter part of the nineteenth century will come to be written, one event will be singled out above all others for its intrinsic importance and for its far-reaching results; namely, the conventions of 1899 and of 1902 between His Imperial Majesty the Sultan of Turkey and the German Company of the Anatolian Railways.”—Charles Sarolea, The Bagdad Railway and German Expansion as a Factor in European Politics (Edinburgh, 1907), p. 3.
“The Turkish Government, I know, have been accused of being corrupt. I venture to submit that it has not been for want of encouragement from Europeans that the Turks have been corrupt. The sinister—I think it is not going too far to use that word—effect of European financiers on Turkey has had more to do with the misgovernment than any Turk, young or old.”—Sir Mark Sykes, in the House of Commons, March 18, 1914.
PREFACE
The Chester concessions and the Anglo-American controversy regarding the Mesopotamian oilfields are but two conspicuous instances of the rapid development of American activity in the Near East. Turkey, already an important market for American goods, gives promise of becoming a valuable source of raw materials for American factories and a fertile field for the investment of American capital. Thus American religious interests in the Holy Land, American educational interests in Anatolia and Syria, and American humanitarian interests in Armenia, are now supplemented by substantial American economic interests in the natural resources of Asia Minor. Political stability and economic progress in Turkey no longer are matters of indifference to business men and politicians in the United States; therefore the Eastern Question—so often a cause of war—assumes a new importance to Americans. This book will have served a useful purpose if—in discussing the conflicting political, cultural, and economic policies of the Great Powers in the Near East during the past three decades—it contributes to a sympathetic understanding of a very complicated problem and suggests to the reader some dangers which American statesmanship would do well to avoid. Students of history and international relations will find in the story of the Bagdad Railway a laboratory full of rich materials for an analysis of modern economic imperialism and its far-reaching consequences.
The assistance of many persons who have been intimately associated with the Bagdad Railway has enabled the author to examine records and documents not heretofore available to the historian. To these persons the author is glad to assign a large measure of any credit which may accrue to this book as an authoritative and definitive account of German railway enterprises in the Near East. He wishes especially to mention: Dr. Arthur von Gwinner, of the Deutsche Bank, president of the Anatolian and Bagdad Railway Companies; Dr. Karl Helfferich, formerly Imperial German Minister of Finance, erstwhile managing director of the Deutsche Bank, and at present a member of the Reichstag; Sir Henry Babington Smith, an associate of the late Sir Ernest Cassel, a director of the Bank of England, president of the National Bank of Turkey, and at one time representative of the British bondholders on the Ottoman Public Debt Administration; Djavid Bey, Ottoman Minister of Finance during the régime of the Young Turks, an economic expert at the first Lausanne Conference, and at present Turkish representative on the Ottoman Public Debt Administration; Mr. Ernest Rechnitzer, a banker of Paris and London, a competitor for the Bagdad Railway concession in 1898–1899; Rear Admiral Colby M. Chester, of the United States Navy (retired), beneficiary of the “Chester concessions.”