Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/122

 disturb the quiet which heretofore had ruled in the banking community of Constantinople and of Asiatic Turkey. Germans were disturbing the financial, as well as the commercial and industrial, status quo in the Near East!

The advance of the German banks in Turkey was almost certain to be the first step in a more general industrial and commercial penetration. This will be the more readily understood if one recalls the close coöperation which characterized the relationships between the German banks and the business interests of the empire. This coöperation—which amounted, in effect, to financial interdependence—was one of the striking features of the German economic advance in the generation before the Great War. It strengthened German industrial enterprises at home and promoted German trade and investments abroad. If a great business needed capital, the banks furnished the necessary funds by the purchase of securities which made them at once creditors and copartners in that business. Sooner or later this connection would find expression in the appointment of a representative of the bank on the supervisory council of the industrial enterprise; occasionally a "captain of industry" would be elected to the board of directors of the bank. Although this procedure of interlocking directorates was not unique to Germany—it was an established practice in the United States, certainly—there was no country in which these alliances were so far-reaching, or in which financial power was so centrally controlled, as in the German Empire. In Germany finance and industry were wedded—permanently united for better or for worse.[20]

Of this alliance of banking and business the ''Deutsche Bank'', chief promoter of the Bagdad Railway, was a shining example. Its industrial connections were too numerous to catalogue. It enjoyed intimate financial relations with hundreds of companies engaged in every important