Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/130

 Deutsche Mittelmeer Levante Linie, providing service between Marseilles and Genoa and Smyrna, Constantinople, Odessa, and Batum.[31] The considerable increase of trade between Germany and Turkey made a very real place for these lines, especially in the transportation of such commodities as could not be expected to bear the heavy charges of transportation by rail through the Balkans and overland to German cities. These lines were put into operation to provide for a traffic already in existence and waiting for them.

Such was not the case, however, with the establishment of German steamship service to the Persian Gulf. Here British trade had been dominant for centuries. The German railway invasion had not as yet reached Mesopotamia, and German trade in this region was negligible. The establishment of a German steamship service to Basra would be equivalent to the throwing out of an advance guard and reconnaissance expedition on behalf of German trade. Incidentally it would mean the destruction of the practical monopoly which had been enjoyed by the British in the trade of Irak. It was considered of no slight importance, therefore, when, in April of 1906, the Hamburg-American Line announced its intention of establishing a regular service between European ports and the Persian Gulf. An office of the Company was immediately opened at Basra, and in August the first German steamer, with a German cargo, made its way up the Shatt-el-Arab. Soon afterward the Hamburg-American Line inaugurated, also, a service between British ports and Mesopotamia, and it provided a regular schedule of sailing dates, a luxury to which merchants doing business in the Near East had not heretofore been accustomed. With the aid of a government subsidy the German company cut freight rates in half. This rude disturbance of the status quo in the shipping of the Persian Gulf dealt a severe blow to British com