#46 The Invasion of the Ottoman Middle East and Arab Oil

One of the keys to understanding the period between 1914 and 1945 is the continuation of colonialism. Stated or unstated, the expansion and control of foreign states was a major war aim of Britain, France, and Germany. The winners, Britain and France took everything. The one major part of the world uncolonized until this period was the Islamic worlds of the Ottoman Empire.  

“Dinner at the Palace in Honour of an Ambassador” (Topkapı Palace, Istanbul) by Jean Baptiste Vanmour, 18th century.

The Ottomans had been a strong pre-capitalist Empire some hundreds of years old. During the 19th century, as the Europeans expanded, the Ottomans declined in wealth, power, and territory. By 1900, they only existed because the European powers supported the Ottomans geographically to stop the Russian Empire from expanding southwards into the Mediterranean.

Map depicting the Ottoman Empire at its greatest extent, in 1683, By Atilim Gunes Baydin.

As the Europeans prepared for war after 1900, so the Ottomans sided with the Germans. As it turns out, they chose the wrong ally.

Up until 1914, the Ottomans had dominated the lands of the Arab world, as well as parts of the Islamic northern Mediterranean and the peoples of what became Yugoslavia. One of the major war aims of Britain and France had been to colonise Ottoman-controlled peoples.

In the 1870s, John D Rockefeller created the Standard Oil Company. By 1882 far-sighted naval leaders saw that oil was the future of the fleet. Oil was simply a more efficient fuel for shipping, tanks, and aeroplanes. By 1905, the British government was won over. The issue was to obtain supplies and the known main sources at the time were in Odessa and the Persian Gulf. In 1901 the British took a concession for the entire area from the Persian government for 50 years; in 1905 the Anglo Persian Oil Company was founded.

Standard Oil Refinery No. 1 in Cleveland, Ohio, 1897.

Oil was about to take over from coal; it was about to become the new fuel that would power ships, tanks and industry. The problem that faced all the European powers was that they did not have oil as a natural resource on their land; only the USA had their domestic supplies. At the time, the USA was self-sufficient in oil till well after 1945. It was only a matter of time before the major European powers would assert their rights to invade and colonise the oil-rich Arab lands of the Middle East.

The railway infrastructure at the beginning of the 20th century, being built by the Germans with the support of the Ottoman government from Constantinople to Bagdad was seen by the British as a dire threat to the Indian subcontinent and the Suez Canal:

“If Berlin-Bagdad were achieved, a huge block of territory producing every kind of economic wealth, and unassailable by sea power would be united under German authority... German and Turkish armies would be within easy striking distance of our Egyptian interest, and from the Persian Gulf, our Indian Empire would be threatened. The port of Alexandria and the control of the Dardanelles would soon give Germany enormous naval power.”

- Quoted from Engdahl: A Century of War, page 23, from R G D Laffan, a senior British military advisor

Germany, it appears, wished to co-operate with Britain and France, but foremost she wanted to secure her own petroleum needs and under the old terms of European competitive colonialism to deny her rivals her oil fields.

Were these issues sufficient for Britain to go to war with Germany? Britain had grown to be the great power in Europe and throughout the rest of the world since 1815. As we know today, dominant world power status creates an aura around the leaders of their invincibility and their moral purpose. It was no different in 1914, England considered herself threatened by Germany, as a German banker quoted by Engdahl understood:

“… England felt threatened from Germany more than any other land in its global economic position and its naval supremacy ... the English-German differences were unbridgeable, and susceptible to no agreement in any single question.”

- Engdahl, A Century of War, page 29

The single question was how to control oil supplies: an essential component of British/French policy during the 1914 war.

Until the latter part of the 19th century, the Arab lands of the Middle East had been a relative backwater in terms of European colonial policy. This interest altered with the advent of the Egyptian Suez Canal dug and then opened in 1869. The canal was paid for by British and French loans. When these were not repaid on time, the British colonised the area in 1882 to ensure that the stockholders, largely merchant banks, who raised the shares who owned the canal would be repaid. Thereafter Britain and France had a major interest in the area, as the gateway for shipping to India and China. It was from this time and these events that the Middle East became a central issue for all the European belligerent powers. A few years later; the need for oil became apparent.

Russia had always had a major interest in the area as she pushed southwards towards the Mediterranean. Long before the 19th century, the waterways to the south of the Black sea had provided Russian shipping access to the Mediterranean. Russia had been pushing south in the Caucasus and the Black sea through much of the 19th century. Britain and France had supported the Ottomans against the Russian military through much of this period. The war in Crimea in 1853-56 had been fought by the Ottomans with British and French support to stop Russia from invading Istanbul. Russia, therefore, had a strong strategic interest in the whole Arab world.

It is important to grasp the global importance, historically and strategically, of the Arab-Turkish world. This area of land is in between two great land areas. To the west is all of Europe and western Russia and to the east is Asia: two great landmasses. In the days of the silk trade routes from Asia, goods by land had to move through central Asia up through Arabia and only then into Europe. Silk Road maps in many books provide a wonderful illustration of the movement of goods before the industrial era.

Once this strategic region is understood, the importance of colonial control of the Mediterranean becomes clear. Control of Constantinople/Istanbul historically has been of the utmost importance for all the players at least for the last 1000 years. When Britain offered the Russians Istanbul in 1914, if they would join them in fighting Germany, the importance of the offer was straightforward. The fact is probably that the British never intended to allow the Russians control of Istanbul. The invasion of Turkey at Gallipoli in February 1914 by Britain and France with assorted but insufficient forces of Australian and New Zealand men was possibly a feint. Loss of men was huge, but Kitchener, who was ultimately in charge of this invasion, possibly never intended to win and leave Russia in charge.

Control of the entire Arab region was a major goal of the war in 1914 for Britain and France. Germany had to be denied colonies in potentially oil-rich lands. The entire region had been under the control of the Ottomans for 400 years. The Ottomans had realised the threat posed by the industrialising Europeans; after 1815, they had taken a range of measures to copy western military techniques. Their weakness arose when they borrowed sterling from London and could not repay it on time.  What happened next,  Britain invaded and colonised Egypt.

Despite the many weaknesses in the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the 20th century, the whole of Arabia, except for Egypt, was still under Ottoman control in 1914. Britain and France decided early on in 1915 how they would divide and colonise the Arab lands among themselves. The problem they faced was how to fight the Germans in Europe and the Ottomans in Arabia both at the same time.

Two men - one British, Sykes, and one French, Picot, - made a secret agreement in 1915 to divide up the oil-rich lands between their two countries.

France and Britain had needed to use their fighting men in Europe. It should not be forgotten that Britain used hundreds of thousands of men from Australia, New Zealand, India, and China, the latter two people in a form of bonded labour. Germany did not possess these human reserves. In Arabia, with the help of an Englishman called Lawrence, glorified as Lawrence of Arabia, the Arab leaders were persuaded to fight against the Ottomans on the understanding that they would be rewarded with the political control of Arabia. Here was an early example of using Islamic forces to fight western battles. The Arab fighters were duped; the British and the French wanted the oil-rich lands for themselves and to deny all others. The Arabs are supposed to have lost 100,000 men in this struggle. The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1915 was implemented in 1922.

“Peace conference: memoranda respecting Syria, Arabia and Palestine” 1919. Retrieved from The British Library.

The Sevres 1920 Agreement highlights the real French and British intentions. The Peace Treaty of Sevres that the Ottoman Sultan was forced to sign in August 1920 was similar in kind to the breakup and division of Africa in 1884. Britain was to take a mandate of Iraq and Palestine (Britain’s existing oil and commercial concessions were reaffirmed). France was to take Syria and Lebanon. Zones of influence were demarcated for the French, Greeks and Italy. Kurdistan and Armenia were left undecided, so too was the kingdom of Hejaz (mainly Saudi Arabia today).

The Sevres Agreement is given little attention today. The treaty was never implemented; it is mentioned here as the agreement illustrates what the winners intended to achieve: the breakup of the Ottoman empire into small nation-states owned by a variety of British and French allies. Greece in 1920 was not satisfied with Sevres, they wanted to control Constantinople; with British support, they invaded what was left of Turkey, ruled by Mustafa Kemal. Kemal raised a new Turkish army and drove the Greeks back to the Mediterranean. For the Turks the war did not end until October 1922, this final war created the conditions as their war of independence. It was also the basis for the next 100 years of enmity between Turkey and Greece. Thereafter, Kemal Ataturk ruled the new Turkey with an iron hand. His sovereignty was assured through the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.

Mehmed VI, the last Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, leaving the country after the abolition of the Ottoman sultanate, 17 November 1922. Retrieved from Wikipedia.

Ataturk immediately set about Europeanising Turkey. This had two elements, one racial and the other might be termed by some as modernisation. He created a civil legal code, upgraded education, made the sexes equal in law, created full political rights, outlawed Islam and the Arabic alphabet and replaced it with Latin. On the racial side, he continued with the eradication of the Armenians, expelled the Greeks, and returned them to Greece. Ataturk was socially purifying Turkey, removing all ethnicities except one, the Turk. Some might see this as preparing the conditions for industrialisation.

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Suggested Reading

British War aims:

Many history books in the mainstream will assert that Britain had no interest in the war in 1914. This generous interpretation assumes British good intentions towards defending her own people, and many readers will continue to believe this; as well geopolitically in defending her empire; that in effect would have meant avoiding Germany's growing global status, But there are an alternative argument and contrary evidence, see:

Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (1st ed.). New York: Macmillan Publishing Company. 1966. ISBN 978-0026001304. 1,348 pages. Full text.

Guido Preparata, Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Made the Third Reich, Pluto Press, 2005.

William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics & the New World, Progressive Press, 2012.

Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War, Mainstream Publishing, 2013.

The Versailles Treaty:

J M Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, London: Macmillan & Co., Limited. 1919. View on The Internet Archive.

Katherine T Harris, The Geopolitics of Oil, Nova Science Publishers Inc, 2009.

William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics & the New World, Progressive Press, 2012.

Dana Visalli, The Road to Hell: A Brief History of Modern Syria, 2016. View PDF online.

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