1915 — Very Good Turkish, Ottoman (1500-1928) In modern aesthetic cloth bdg. Foolscap 8vo. (18 x 12 cm). In Ottoman script. 122, [3] p., 1 map of Baghdad railways. The Baghdad Railway, also known as the Berlin-Baghdad railway was built from 1910 to 1940 to connect Berlin with the then Ottoman city of Baghdad, from where the Germans wanted to establish a port on the Persian Gulf, with a 1,600 kilometers (1,000 mi) line through modern-day Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. Completion of the project took several decades and by the outbreak of World War I, the railway was still 960 km (600 miles) away from its intended objective. The last stretch to Baghdad was built in the late 1930s and the first train to travel from Istanbul to Baghdad departed in 1940. Funding, engineering, and construction were mainly provided by the German Empire through Deutsche Bank and the Philipp Holzmann company, which in the 1890s had built the Anatolian Railway (Anatolische Eisenbahn) connecting Constantinople, Ankara, and Konya. The Ottoman Empire wished to maintain its control of the Arabian Peninsula and to expand its influence across the Red Sea into the nominally Ottoman (until 1914) Khedivate of Egypt, which had been under British military control since the Urabi Revolt in 1882. If the railway had been completed, the Germans would have gained access to suspected oil fields in Mesopotamia, as well as a connection to the port of Basra on the Persian Gulf. The latter would have provided access to the eastern parts of the German colonial empire and avoided the Suez Canal, which was controlled by British and French interests. The railway became a source of international disputes during the years immediately preceding World War I. Rohrbach was a Baltic German writer, concerned with "world politics." Paul Rohrbach, the Settlement Commissioner for Germany's colonies in Southwest Africa from 1903 to 1906 and one of the most outspoken promoters of German imperialism, reflected on this international attraction, stating that "the history of the plans of the Baghdad Railway has stood on its own moment in high grade under the effects of political history, Turkish or otherwise. Not only England, [but] especially also Russia take at the outset the right of defense through several claims" in this study. Hegira 1331 = Gregorian 1915. Özege 7050. First and Only Edition.
