Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/83

 *lapsed, however, in October, 1899, when the outbreak of the Boer War diverted British attention and energies from the Near East to South Africa.[9] It was under these circumstances that the Sultan, on November 27, 1899, announced his decision to award to the Deutsche Bank the concession for a railway from Konia to Bagdad and the Persian Gulf.[10]

The success of the Germans was not unexpected. They had a strong claim to the concession, for, in 1888 and again in 1893, the Sultan had assured the Anatolian Railway Company that it should have priority in the construction of any railway to Bagdad. On the strength of that assurance, the Anatolian Company had conducted expensive surveys of the proposed line.[11] After a short period of sharp competition for the concession in 1899, the Deutsche Bank group was left in sole possession of the field—the Russian promoters had withdrawn because of lack of support at home; the French financiers had accepted a share in the German company in preference to sole responsibility for the enterprise; the British proposals had lost support when the Boer difficulty temporarily obscured all other issues. The diplomatic situation, furthermore, was distinctly favorable to the German claims. The Fashoda Affair and the serious Anglo-Russian rivalry in the Middle East had served to put Russia, France, and Great Britain at sixes and sevens, leaving Germans practically a free hand in the development of their interests in Asia Minor.

Aside from these purely temporary advantages, however, there were excellent reasons, from the Ottoman point of view, for awarding the Bagdad Railway concessions to the German Anatolian Railway Company. The usual explanations—that the soft, sweet-sounding flattery of William II overcame the shrewdness of Abdul Hamid; that Baron Marschall von Bieberstein dominated the entire diplomatic