96 A Short History of the Middle East
German capitalist-imperialism* and likely to embitter relations
with Britain. A Turkish liberal Minister of Finance had said,
'When you entered the board-room of the Baghdad Railway Co.,
you breathed the atmosphere of the Minister's office in the Wil-
helmstrasse'. Germany had made great efforts to gain influence in
Persia also, exploiting the extreme Persian dislike of the Anglo-
Russian Agreement of 1907. Her Ministers 'fished assiduously in
the troubled waters of Tehran'; there was a steady increase in
German imports; and a new college at Tehran received a handsome
subsidy from the German government and was staffed with Ger-
man teachers. The energetic and resourceful German Consul at
Bushire, Wassniuss, recruited a strong pro-German faction among
the tribesmen of Pars province. The officers of the Persian gendar-
merie, and the Swedish officers who had been training them, be-
came in effect German agents. So successful was this German pene-
tration of the British and neutral zones of Persia that, following the
outbreak of the First World War, by the end of 1915 German in-
fluence was predominant there, except for the Gulf ports. The
Allied colonies had to be withdrawn, and seven branches of the
British-controlled Imperial Bank of Persia fell into enemy hands.
The German Meissner Pasha had undertaken for Abdul Hamid the
building of the Hijaz Railway which, besides its ostensible purpose
of taking Muslim pilgrims to the Holy Cities, had the strategic
advantage of affording the rapid movement of Turkish troops to
Western Arabia without passing through the Suez Canal. In Egypt
the Germans were at some pains to establish friendly relations with
the growing Nationalist party.1
Britain likewise had not been slow to strengthen her position in
the Middle East. Already in January 1912 a special committee set
up by the Government of India had proposed the occupation of
Basra in the event of war. In 1913 the Admiralty, having decided
to convert the Navy to the use of oil-fuel, bought a controlling
interest in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co., which had by now sunk two
hundred wells and completed the pipeline from its fields to the
Abadan refinery. The Sheikh of Muhatnmara, Arab by race but a
Persian subject, who ruled the Abadan district, was assured of
British support in maintaining his local authority against the
Sultan and the Shah alike. In anticipation that oil might be found
in Bahrain, its Sheikh had been induced in 1911 to undertake to
1 Sir Ronald Storrs, Orientations, definitive ed. (1943), 120 fF,