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  • Distant Ties: Germany, the Ottoman Empire, and the Construction of the Baghdad Railway
  • Yakup Bektas (bio)
Distant Ties: Germany, the Ottoman Empire, and the Construction of the Baghdad Railway. By Jonathan S. McMurray. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2001. Pp. x+155. $67.95.

During the late 1830s, British politicians and entrepreneurs in search of a shorter route to India began to debate a scheme for a grand railway from Europe to the Persian Gulf via Turkey, when a railway boom was just taking hold there. After the Crimean War, a railway company was formed in London to connect the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf via the banks of the Euphrates River. This projected Euphrates Valley Railway became the British rival to the French Suez Canal (opened in 1869), and for four decades excited enormous public debate inside and outside Britain. The [End Page 872] Ottoman sultans wanted it to pass through Istanbul. But the British—after securing a route to India with the purchase of the Suez Canal in 1875 and the subsequent occupation of Egypt in 1882—not only grew reluctant to undertake the project, they came to oppose it.

The economically and industrially expanding Germany then emerged as a contender. German firms began to win major Ottoman railway concessions, and by 1896 had extended lines from Istanbul to Ankara and Konya in central Turkey. Construction of the extension from Konya to Basra financed by the Deutsche Bank—what has been called the Berlin-Baghdad Railway—began in 1903, but was abandoned several hundred miles short of Baghdad in 1918.

In Distant Ties, Jonathan McMurray seeks to reevaluate the import of this railway for Germany and the Ottoman Empire by means of the following arguments. First, the project was neither a German imperialistic scheme to colonize the Ottoman Empire nor a purely entrepreneurial and financial undertaking. McMurray points to a number of reasons for German involvement, and is particularly interested in describing the role played by individuals such as Wilhelm von Pressel (1821-1902). A German railway engineer in the service of the sultan, von Pressel lived in Turkey for four decades and promoted the railway both in Germany and Turkey. Second, this vast project, though largely financed and managed in Germany, did not make the Ottoman Empire a German satellite. Nor did it cause or accelerate the fall of the Ottoman Empire. On the contrary, the intent was to revive the empire and stave off further European penetration, and the sultan and his government made sure that the railway served the Ottoman interests first. Third, McMurray argues that this project laid foundations for an enduring Turco-German relationship and helped facilitate their alliance during World War I.

Although these arguments are all valid, a clear discrepancy emerges between what McMurray promises and what he delivers. He suggests that the railway served as an "intercultural experiment," but leaves that idea largely undeveloped when this perhaps should have been the strength of the book, given McMurray's promise "to document the important Ottoman contribution" (p. 1). Yet he actually concludes—just as some of his historical actors did—that "the Turks' greatest contribution to the railway was their own obstructionism" (p. 131). Here he merely repeats a prevalent nineteenth-century European bias. Although he draws on published and unpublished German documents, reports, and personal memoirs, he takes them at face value, and moreover takes them as the basis for his presentation of the Ottoman side of the story. He does not consider that the perceived "obstructionism" might have been an expression of Ottoman wariness about the intentions and activities of the European powers in their empire or an effort to achieve a tactical balance among them.

McMurray's failure to consult adequately even secondary Turkish-Ottoman [End Page 873] sources only further weakens his promised "balanced history." The book also includes a number of minor errors concerning Ottoman-Turkish history. For example, the Crimean War was fought not in 1850 (p. 16) but from 1853 to 1856; and Mustafa Kemal (later Atatürk) was not a member of the Ottoman cabinet in 1917 (p. 125).

Despite its flaws, however, Distant Ties makes a worthy effort to demonstrate the cross...

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