The results on the completed sections of the Bagdad Railway were equally promising, as will be indicated by the following table:[20]
Year | Kilometres in Operation | Passengers | Freight Tons | Gross Receips per Kilometres (Francs) | Total Govenment Subsidy (Francs) |
| 1906 | 200 | 29,629 | 13,693 | 1,368.83 | 624,028.21 |
| 1907 | 200 | 37,145 | 23,643 | 1,754.44 | 546,129.77 |
| 1908 | 200 | 52,759 | 15,941 | 1,839.86 | 529,443.12 |
| 1909 | 200 | 57,026 | 15,364 | 1,936.72 | 509,565.45 |
| 1910 | 200 | 71,665 | 27,756 | 2,571.43 | 381,135.58 |
| 1911 | 238 | 95,884 | 38,046 | 3,379.34 | 238,166.59 |
| 1912 | 609 | 288,833 | 57,670 | 5,315.67 | 278,785.25 |
| 1913 | 609 | 407,474 | 78,645 | 3,786.53 | 216,295.17 |
| 1914 | 887 | 597,675 | 116,194 | 8,177.97 | 2,939,983.00 |
Figures in italics indicate payments to the Turkish Government of its share of the receipts in excess of the guarantee of 4,500 francs per kilometre.
The improvement in the economic conditions of Anatolia, and the success of the German railways as business enterprises, were sources of great satisfaction and profit to the Imperial Ottoman Government. Not only was the Treasury receiving revenue from the railway lines which had formerly been a drain upon the financial resources of the empire, but the receipts from taxes in the regions traversed by the railways were constantly increasing. As early as 1893 the Ottoman Ministry of Public Works announced that the increase in tithes and the increased value of farm lands in Asia Minor had more than justified expenditures by the Sultan’s Government in subsidies to the Anatolian Railway.[21] For those portions of Anatolia which were served by the Railway, the amount of the tithes had almost doubled in twenty years: in 1889, the year after the award of the Anatolian concession, $639,760 was collected; in 1898, $948,070; in 1908, $1,240,450. In certain districts the amount of the tithes collected in 1908 was five or six times as great as the yield before the construction of the Railway.[22]
The economic prospects of Turkey never were brighter than they were just before the outbreak of the Great War. The new régime had removed many of the vexatious restrictions on individual initiative which had characterized the rule of Abdul Hamid. The country’s losses in men in the Italian and Balkan wars had been made up by an immigration of Moslem refugees from the ceded territories. Numerous concessions had been granted for the exploitation of mines, the construction of public utilities, and the improvement of the means of communication. “There was a feeling abroad in the land that an era of exceptional commercial and industrial activity was about to dawn upon Turkey.” The Ottoman Empire was in a fair way to become modernized according to Western standards.[23]
Thus the Anatolian and Bagdad Railways achieved all that was claimed for them by their sponsors. They increased political security in Asia Minor; they brought about an economic renaissance in the homeland of the Turks; they justified the investment of public funds which was necessary to bring the system to completion. Beyond the Amanus Mountains lay the plains of Syria and the great unexploited wealth of Mesopotamia. A development of Mesopotamia, even as modest as that achieved in Anatolia, would pay the cost of the Bagdad Railway many times over. Were the Ottoman statesmen who supported this great project to be condemned for so great a service to their country? Or would they have been short-sighted had they failed to realize the great potentialities of railway construction in Asiatic Turkey? That the Bagdad Railway contributed to the causes of Turkish participation in the Great War—and to the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire—was not so much the fault of the Turks themselves as it was the blight laid upon Turkey, a “backward nation,” by European imperialism.
The Young Turks Have Some Mental Reservations
Although the revolutionary party in Turkey had come to look with favor upon German influence in the Near East, and particularly to support the Bagdad Railway, there is little reason for accepting the too hastily drawn conclusion that the Young Turks had sold their country to the Kaiser or that they were under a definite obligation to subscribe to German diplomatic policies. They were too strongly nationalistic for that. They believed that the Ottoman Empire must eventually rid itself of foreign administrative assistance, foreign capital invested under far-reaching economic concessions, and foreign interference in Ottoman political affairs. But for a period of transition—during which Turkey could learn the secrets of Western progress and adapt them to her own purposes—it was the obvious duty of a forward-looking government to utilize European capital and European technical assistance for the welfare of the empire. Patriotism and modernism went hand in hand in the Young Turk program.[24]
The Young Turks were not unaware of the menace of the Bagdad Railway to their own best hopes. As Djavid Bey appropriately says: “The great drawback of this enterprise was its political character, which clung to it and became a source of endless toil and anxiety for the country. In a word, it poisoned the political life of Turkey. If the Bagdad concession had not been granted, the revolutionary government could have solved much more easily pending political and economic problems. But one must admire the courage of Abdul Hamid in granting the concession, no matter what the cost, because the construction of the Bagdad line was essential for the defence and the economic progress of the empire. Unfortunately for Turkey, she has always had to suffer from such politico-economic concessions.
“The Bagdad Railway did not escape the malady of politics. When one entered the meeting room of the company, one breathed the atmosphere of the ministerial chamber in Wilhelmstrasse and felt in both Gwinner and Helfferich the presence of undersecretaries for foreign affairs. This state of affairs, instead of simplifying the negotiations and relations between Germany and Turkey, served only to envenom them.”