Britain and Her Rivals in the Middle East 89
and as an international provocation to war; and I should impeach.
the British minister who was guilty of acquiescing in such a sur-
render as a traitor to his country/ At the same time he applauded
Britain's imposing on the Sultan of Oman the customary prohibi-
tion from ceding or leasing any concessions, and commented,
'We subsidize its ruler; we dictate its policy; we should tolerate no
rival influence'. While the two Powers were locked in tense
rivalry for obtaining preponderance in Persia through loans and
commercial concessions, several countries were canvassing plans
for a railway connecting the Levant with the Persian Gulf. The
Russian Consul at Baghdad was scheming to obtain a Russian port
and naval base on the Gulf; and it was learnt in 1898 that an Austro-
Russian syndicate had applied to the Ottoman government for a
concession for a railway from Syrian Tripoli to Kuwait, the finest
natural harbour on the Persian Gulf. Britain had recently declined
a request for protection from Sheikh Mubarak of Kuwait, who
had come to the throne by murdering his pro-Turkish brother; but
in these new circumstances Lord Curzon, now Viceroy of India,
sent the Resident in the Persian Gulf to negotiate a secret agree-
ment with the Sheikh, in which he too undertook to grant no
leases or concessions without Britain's agreement. Curzon now
summed up British policy in this region in a series of Olympian
rhetorical questions. 'Are we prepared to surrender control of the
Persian Gulf and divide that of the Indian Ocean? Are we prepared
to make the construction of the Euphrates Valley Railroad or some
kindred scheme an impossibility for England and an ultimate cer-
tainty for Russia? Is Baghdad to become a new Russian capital in
the south? Lastly, are we content to see a naval station within a few
day's sail of Karachi, and to contemplate a naval squadron battering
Bombay?'
At this stage no one could have foreseen that within seven years
of the beginning of the new century these longstanding and bitter
conflicts of interest between Britain on the one hand, and Russia
and France on the other, were destined to be temporarily liquidated
in the powerful flux of a still more formidable challenge to all three
Powers from the recently-born German Empire.
•k * *
Until 1870 German interests in the Middle East had been con-
fined to missionary activities in Syria and Palestine and to a small