The European nations most vitally concerned in the dismemberment of the Sultan’s dominions are four in number. Great Britain’s interest is born of the Empire’s relation to Egypt and India. The cause of Russian progress depends on the country’s access to warm seaports. Germany is the newcomer on the scene and, as a land power, is engaged in extending her land area. To her sons Turkey offers an attractive colonization area and at the same time the land route which will render them independent of the sea-way passing through Suez to the east. As a colonial power of the first magnitude, no less than on account of her millions of Mohammedan subjects, France cannot be disinterested in the fate of the corelands of Islam.
Turkey is the Asiatic pendant of the intercontinental highway represented in Europe by the Balkan peninsula. Through Asia Minor the land provides a convenient causeway between Asia and Europe. Through Arabia it connects Asia to Africa. Again, through the combined position of Asia Minor and Syria it becomes possible to maintain continuous land travel from Europe to Africa. Turkey is thus the ideal center of the eastern hemisphere. Mastery of its territory is bound to turn the flow of intercontinental trade into the lap of its holders. The entire history of European conflict over Turkish lands is wrapped up in this geographical fact.
Italians were the pioneers of European trade with Turkey after the consolidation of Ottoman power. In this Genoese and Venetian traders merely followed in the footsteps of their fathers, whose dealings with the Byzantines had been considerable. French merchants were not slow to compete with Italians. In the fifteenth century British drapers and commissioners begin to appear in the Levant. Germans show signs of activity a hundred years later, but confine their operation mainly to the European dominions of the Sultans. From these beginnings to the twentieth-century territorial claims of the great powers is but a natural economic unfolding.
Turkey’s remarkably central position in the eastern hemisphere makes the country the threshold of Great Britain’s Asiatic dominions as well as the natural land connection between British Africa and British Asia. From India westward and from the British zone in southern Persia as defined by the Anglo-Russian convention of 1907, to the Sultanate of Egypt, southern Turkey, represented by Lower Mesopotamia and Arabia, is the only stretch of territory in which the British government does not exercise direct control; and the task of consolidating British influence in these two regions of the Turkish Empire is well advanced.
In the economic life of modern Mesopotamia British influence is paramount. About 90 per cent of the trade of Basra and Bagdad is in British hands. Steam navigation on the Euphrates and Tigris with its attendant privileges of transportation is a monopoly exercised by the British. This means that all the Persian trade which enters or leaves the country through its southern Turkish border must pay toll to British capital. Most important of all, the stupendous task of reclaiming the great twin-river valley has been undertaken by British enterprise.
The area of agricultural lands in Lower Mesopotamia is generally calculated at ten times the total surface of farming land in Egypt. The territory suited for cultivation extends northward from the Persian Gulf roughly to a line drawn from the bend of the Euphrates at Anah to Tekrit on the Tigris. Its eastern boundary is defined by the Zagros and Pusht-i-Koh mountains. On the west it reaches the Great Syrian desert as far as its junction with the plateau of Arabia. Thus defined the region is the great alluvial plain of Mesopotamia. A stretch of land remarkably rich in humus, it only needs a just rule and competent engineers in order to become highly productive.
In olden days the entire district was one vast field. Its fertility had earned it the name of granary of the world. Herodotus extols its productivity: “ ... In grain it is so fruitful as to yield commonly two-hundred fold. The blade of the wheat plant and barley plant is often four fingers in breadth.”[204] In their present state the once productive lands present the appearance of a desert. The old irrigation ditches are in ruins. Mile upon mile of parched, cloggy soil or dreary marsh take the place of ancient fields.
The reclamation of this arid country was undertaken in 1908 by British engineers headed by Sir William Willcocks. In the Delta region of Mesopotamia, comprising the entire drainage valley extending south of Hit on the Euphrates and of Samarra on the Tigris, between 12 and 13 million acres of first-class irrigation land were to be converted into productive areas. In spite of Turkish opposition the work advanced with sufficient rapidity for the Hindiyeh Barrage to be inaugurated in 1914. At a distance of twenty centuries a handful of plucky northerners had, notwithstanding well-nigh insurmountable obstacles, put the last touches to a drainage project begun on the same spot by Alexander the Great, the construction of a new head for the Hindiyeh branch or Pallocopas having been that monarch’s first public work in Babylonia.[205]
In the Persian Gulf British influence advanced by great strides during the present century. Within the last ten years the policing of the gulf waters and harbors has been undertaken by Britain’s men-of-war. An appreciable curtailment of the trade in firearms followed the tracking of gun-runners by British captains. The important towns of the Persian and Arabian coast are virtually British possessions. Bushire[206] on the eastern shore, Koweit on the west are protectorates. The trend of it all is to advance India’s western frontier to the line of the Euphrates.