Baghdad Railway - Role in Origins of World War I

Role in Origins of World War I

Discussion of the railway's role as a contributing factor to the outbreak of war is complicated by two issues:

Firstly, historians and political analysts who wrote about this issue directly after the war were not in possession of closed diplomatic records. Full diplomatic documents of the German government were released between 1922 and 1927, British documents between 1926 and 1938. Only some Russian documents were released, and Italian documents only came out after the Second World War.

Secondly, war historians tend to give an interpretation of the facts that is clouded by their own partisanship, political orientation, language, and contemporary perspectives. Socialist historians emphasised imperial rivalries and economic monopolies as the driving force for the war, as was popularly reported with respect to the railway at the time and especially as revealed in the Russian diplomatic documents. Regardless of diplomacy, financing and agreements, and later points of view, the existence of the railway would have created a threat to British dominance over German trade, as it would have given German industry access to oil, and a port in the Persian Gulf. The importance of oil as opposed to coal as fuel was recognised, as it could greatly improve the performance and capacity of the rival navies. The presence of the British there, and the creating of Kuwait to block non-British access to the Persian Gulf speaks to the strategic importance.

Other historians have argued that intractable nationality issues in the denial of self-determination to minority groups were among the dominant causes of World War I. They argue that although the railway issue was heated before 1914 (Corrigan shows that the railway issue was driving Germany and Turkey further apart) conservative historians agree that it was not a cause of World War I, because the main controversies (over financing) had been resolved before the war started.

"Some of the optimism should be attributed to the willingness of the German government to compose long-standing differences... and in June 1914 a settlement was achieved over the Baghdad railway." (Evans)

"Many economic and colonial issues which had been causing friction between French, German and British governments before 1914, such as the financing of the Berlin-Baghdad railway and the future disposition of the Portuguese colonies, had been resolved by the summer of 1914." (Henig)

However, war began on August 1, 1914 — and one day later the secret treaty establishing the Ottoman-German Alliance was signed, perhaps giving credence to the notion that the issue had not been fully resolved. In fact, restriction of German access to Mesopotamia and its oil, and strategic exclusion from rail access to the Persian Gulf was enforced by British military presence during World War I, and afterwards by removal of the would-be Baghdad Railway from German ownership. Thus the potential consequences to Anglo-German economic rivalry in oil and trade by the existence of the railway, rather than the financing of it is seen by some as the deeper issue.