India, an empire in itself, is the keystone of the British imperial system. To defend India it has been considered necessary for Great Britain to possess herself of vital strategic points along the routes of communication from the Atlantic seaboard to the Indian Ocean. The acquisition of Cape Colony from the Dutch at the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars enabled the British fleet to dominate the old route to India, around the Cape of Good Hope. Judiciously placed naval stations at Gibraltar, Malta, and Cyprus assured the safety of British trade with the East via the Mediterranean. After a futile attempt to prevent the construction of the Suez Canal, which temporarily placed a new and shorter all-water route to India in the hands of the French, Great Britain proceeded to acquire the Canal for herself. To assure the protection of the Suez Canal, in turn, it was necessary to occupy Egypt and the Sudan. Control of Somaliland and Aden, together with friendly relations with Arabia, turned the Red Sea into a British lake. Menaced by the Russian advance toward India, Great Britain proceeded to dominate the entire Middle East: the foreign affairs of Afghanistan were placed under British tutelage and protection; Baluchistan was compelled to submit to the control of British agents; parts of Persia were brought within the sphere of British influence.[23]
Great Britain, apparently, was determined to control every important route to India. What, then, would be her attitude toward a trans-Mesopotamian railway, terminating at the only satisfactory deep-water port on the Persian Gulf? Was the possession of such a short-cut to India consistent with the exigencies of imperial defence?
Without a satisfactory terminus on the Persian Gulf the Bagdad Railway would lose its greatest possibilities as a great transcontinental line; with such a terminus it might become a menace to vital British interests in that region. British imperialists had been interested in control of the Persian Gulf since the seventeenth century, when the East India Company established trading posts along its shores. The British navy cleared the Gulf of pirates; it buoyed and beaconed the waters of the Gulf and the Shatt-el-Arab. A favorable treaty with the Emir of Muscat, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, provided Great Britain with a “sally port” from which to organize the defence of the entrance to the Gulf; later, Muscat became a protectorate of Great Britain. From time to time treaties were negotiated with the Arab chieftains of southern Mesopotamia, extending British influence up the Shatt-el-Arab and the Tigris and Euphrates to Bagdad. Under these circumstances, it was apparent from the very beginning that, whether or not the Balfour Government consented to British participation in the Bagdad enterprise, there would be no surrender of the privileged position enjoyed by Great Britain in the Persian Gulf. Foreign merchants might be admitted to a share in the Gulf trade, but the existence of a port under foreign control hardly could be approved.[24]
Lord Lansdowne, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, speaking before the House of Lords, on May 5, 1903, made the position of the Government clear: “I do not yield to the noble Lord [Lord Ellenborough] in the interest which I take in the Persian Gulf or in the feeling that this country stands, with regard to the navigation of the Persian Gulf, in a position different from that of any other power.... The noble Lord has asked me for a statement of our policy with regard to the Persian Gulf. I think I can give him one in a few simple words. It seems to me that our policy should be directed in the first place to protect and promote British trade in those waters. In the next place I do not think that he suggests, or that we would suggest, that those efforts should be directed towards the exclusion of the legitimate trade of other powers. In the third place—I say it without hesitation—we should regard the establishment of a naval base, or of a fortified port, in the Persian Gulf by any other power as a very grave menace to British interests, and we should certainly resist it with all the means at our disposal. I say that in no minatory spirit, because, as far as I am aware, no proposals are on foot for the establishment of a foreign naval base in the Persian Gulf.”[25]
Lord Lansdowne might have reminded his hearers that, although the British Government was disposed to be friendly toward the Bagdad Railway, measures already had been taken which effectively precluded any possibility of the construction by the concessionaires, without British consent, of terminal and port works at Koweit. In 1899, when the first announcements came from Constantinople regarding the Bagdad project, Lord Curzon, then Viceroy of India, became alarmed at the construction of a railway which would link the head of the Persian Gulf with the railways of Central Europe. Lord Curzon was a trained imperialist. It was his custom to utter few words; to make no proclamations from the housetops; to act promptly—and in secret. It was at the instigation of the Indian Government that Colonel Meade, British resident in the Persian Gulf region, proceeded to Koweit and negotiated with the Sheik a clandestine agreement by which the latter accepted the “protection” of the British Government and agreed to enter into no international agreements without the consent of a British resident adviser.[26] When a German technical commission visited Koweit in 1900 to negotiate for terminal and port facilities, they found the Sheik suspiciously intractable to their wishes. Thereupon Abdul Hamid despatched an expedition to Koweit to assert his sovereignty over the Sheik’s territory, but the presence of a British gunboat rendered both reason and force of no avail.[27]
“Protection” of Koweit by Great Britain served notice on both Turkey and Germany that the construction of a railway, owned and controlled by Germans, to a deep-water port on the Persian Gulf was deemed contrary to the interests of the British Empire. From first to last British officials persistently refused to accede to any arrangement which would thus jeopardize imperial communications. Control of the Persian Gulf, an outpost of Indian defence, became the keynote of British resistance to the Bagdad Railway.
During the visit of William II to England in 1907, he was informed by Lord Haldane, Sir Edward Grey, and other responsible British statesmen, that their objections to the Bagdad enterprise would be removed if the sections of the Railway from Bagdad to Basra and the Persian Gulf were under the administration of British capitalists.[28] In March, 1911, shortly after the Kaiser and the Tsar had reached an agreement at Potsdam on the Bagdad Railway question, Lord Curzon vigorously denounced the enterprise as a blow at the heart of Britain’s empire in India and called upon the Foreign Office to persist in its policy of blocking construction of the final sections of the line.[29] This was in accord with a caustic criticism of German and Russian activities in the Near East, delivered by Mr. Lloyd George to the House of Commons, during which the future Premier made it plain that, whatever course Russia might pursue, Great Britain would not compromise her vital imperial interests in the region of the Persian Gulf.[30] The German concessionaires learned, to their disappointment and chagrin, that, on this point, in any event, the British Government stood firm. Even in 1914, when an international agreement was reached permitting the construction of the Bagdad Railway, Great Britain subscribed to the arrangement with the express proviso that the terminus of the line should be Basra and that the port to be constructed at Basra should be jointly owned and controlled by German and British capitalists. Construction of the line beyond Basra was not to be undertaken without the permission of the British Government.[31]
Although fear of foreign interference in the Persian Gulf region was the chief political objection raised by Great Britain to the construction of the Bagdad Railway, it was supplemented by a number of other objections—all associated, directly or indirectly, with the defence of India. The Bagdad Railway concession of 1903 provided for the construction of a branch line from Bagdad to Khanikin, on the Turco-Persian border. This proposed railway not only would compete with the British caravan trade between these cities, amounting to about three-quarters of a million pounds sterling annually, but would, perhaps, lead to the introduction into the Persian imbroglio of the influence of another Great Power. Persia lay astride one of the natural routes of communication to India. The uncertainty of the situation in Persia already was such as to cause grave concern in Great Britain, and there were few British statesmen who would have welcomed German interference in addition to Russian intrigue.[32]
British imperialists, too, had excellent reason to fear that any increase in the power of the Sultan, such as would be certain to follow the construction of adequate rail communications in the Ottoman Empire, might be but the first step in a renaissance of Mohammedan political ambitions, and, perhaps, a Moslem uprising everywhere against Christian overlords. Such a situation—had it been sufficiently matured before the outbreak of the War of 1914—might have been disastrous to the British position in the East: a rejuvenated Turkey, supported by a powerful Germany, might have been in a position to menace the Suez Canal, “the spinal cord of the Empire,” and to lend assistance to seditious uprisings in Egypt, India, and the Middle East. Why should Britain not have been disturbed at such a prospect, when prominent German publicists were boastfully announcing that this was one of the principal reasons for official espousal of the Bagdadbahn?[33] Why should British statesmen have closed their eyes to such a possibility, when the recognized parliamentary leader of the Social Democratic Party in Germany warned the members of the Reichstag that limits must be placed upon the political ramifications of the Bagdad enterprise, lest it lead to a disastrous war with Great Britain?[34]
Furthermore, British statesmen were too intimately acquainted with the dynamics of capitalistic imperialism to accept the assurances of Germans that the Bagdad Railway, and other German enterprises in Turkey, were business propositions only. They knew that promises to respect the sovereignty of the Sultan were courteous formalities of European diplomatists to cloak scandalous irregularities—it was in full recognition of the sacred and inviolable integrity of Turkey that Disraeli had taken possession and assumed the “defence” of Cyprus in 1878! Furthermore, experienced imperialists knew full well that economic penetration was the foundation of political control. As Mr. Lloyd George informed the House of Commons in 1911, the kilometric guarantee of the Bagdad Railway gave German bankers a firm grip on the public treasury in Turkey, and such a hold on the imperial Ottoman purse-strings might lead no one could prophesy where.[35]