Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/96

 was valued at about £2,500,000 annually. Whether the shadow of the former great Bagdad could be transformed into a living thing was an open question.[38]

Five hundred miles south of Bagdad is the Persian Gulf,[39] the proposed terminus of the Bagdad Railway. About sixty miles north of the Gulf, located on the Shatt-el-Arab—the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers—is the port of Basra, the outlet for the trade of Bagdad. Communication between these two Mesopotamian cities was carried on, in 1903, by means of a weekly steamer service operated by the English firm of Lynch Brothers, under the name "The Euphrates and Tigris Steam Navigation Company, Ltd." The Lynch Brothers—typical British imperial pathfinders—had established themselves at Basra during the decade 1840-1850 and had succeeded during the following half-century in securing a practical monopoly of the river trade from Bagdad to the Persian Gulf. The absence of effective competition and the hesitancy of the Turkish Government to grant permission for the operation of additional steamers were responsible for a totally inadequate service. It was not uncommon for freight to stand on the wharves at Bagdad and Basra for three months or more awaiting transportation. Under these circumstances it was to be expected that freight charges would be exorbitant; it cost more to transfer cargoes from Bagdad to Basra than from Basra to London. The advent of the Bagdad Railway promised great things for the trade of lower Mesopotamia and Persia.[40]

It was the aim of the Turkish Government and the concessionaires not only to compete with the river trade of the Tigris, but to develop the Euphrates valley as well, there being no steamer service on the latter river. With this in mind, it was decided to divert the railway beyond Bagdad from the Tigris to the Euphrates and down the