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viii the author to examine records and documents not heretofore available to the historian. To these persons the author is glad to assign a large measure of any credit which may accrue to this book as an authoritative and definitive account of German railway enterprises in the Near East. He wishes especially to mention: Dr. Arthur von Gwinner, of the Deutsche Bank, president of the Anatolian and Bagdad Railway Companies; Dr. Karl Helfferich, formerly Imperial German Minister of Finance, erstwhile managing director of the Deutsche Bank, and at present a member of the Reichstag; Sir Henry Babington Smith, an associate of the late Sir Ernest Cassel, a director of the Bank of England, president of the National Bank of Turkey, and at one time representative of the British bondholders on the Ottoman Public Debt Administration; Djavid Bey, Ottoman Minister of Finance during the régime of the Young Turks, an economic expert at the first Lausanne Conference, and at present Turkish representative on the Ottoman Public Debt Administration; Mr. Ernest Rechnitzer, a banker of Paris and London, a competitor for the Bagdad Railway concession in 1898-1899; Rear Admiral Colby M. Chester, of the United States Navy (retired), beneficiary of the "Chester concessions."

Valuable assistance in the collection and preparation of material has been rendered, also, by the following persons, to whom the author expresses his grateful appreciation: Sir Charles P. Lucas, director, and Mr. Evans Lewin, librarian, of the Royal Colonial Institute; Sir John Cadman, director of His Majesty's Petroleum Department; Professor George Young, of the University of London, formerly attaché of the British embassy at Constantinople; Mr. Charles V. Sheehan, sub-manager in London of the National City Bank of New York; Mr. M. Zekeria, chief of the Turkish Information Service in the United