Turkey, the Great Powers, and the Bagdad Railway: A study in imperialism

In the decades before the Great War, a railway line cutting through the Ottoman Empire became the flashpoint for the most dangerous geopolitical rivalry of the age. This landmark study traces the Bagdad Railway from its conception in Berlin to its slow construction through Mesopotamia, revealing how German engineers and financiers envisioned a Berlin-to-Baghdad axis that would give the Central Powers access to Persian oil fields and a direct path to the Indian Ocean. But Britain and Russia saw it differently: a German stranglehold on the Ottomans, a threat to the Suez Canal, and the partitioning of lands that had belonged to the Sick Man of Europe. Earle's meticulous account shows how the railway became the vehicle through which the great powers negotiated the death of an empire and the birth of a new world order, where oil, railways, and strategic corridors would determine the fate of nations.