Ottoman Oil
If the crash of the Paris stock exchange had fanned the flames of anti-Semitism across Europe, then in the old empire—the Ottoman—the winds of an anti-Armenian campaign were rising instead.
It was not that the Armenians, looking north toward Europe, had simply been lumped together with the Jews and made the target of a sudden explosion of hatred. The reason was far simpler.
In the late 1870s and early 1880s the Ottomans had been forced to grant independence or cede territory to the Balkan states. The Congress of Berlin in 1878 had settled the matter: Serbia, Montenegro, and Romania gained full sovereignty; Bulgaria, though nominally still a principality, achieved de facto independence. Greece walked away with most of fertile Thessaly and the Arta district of southern Epirus.
Their success sent a powerful message to every subject people still living under the Empire’s rule.
Shouldn’t we seek independence too—or reunite with our motherland?
The Ottoman government watched these stirrings with mounting unease. To crack down openly would invite disaster.
“Have you forgotten Russia, the elder brother of Orthodoxy? Touch the younger brothers and they may come back to thrash us the way they did a few years ago.”
The trauma of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 still ran deep. So the Porte preferred to do nothing—until Russia itself handed them a pretext.
“Minorities? Nonsense! You are subjects of Great Russia. Learn Russian. Obey Russian law. There is no such thing as a national language!”
As the Tsar’s government drove its assimilation policy with iron force, the Ottoman ministers suddenly saw the light.
“Perhaps we can do a little suppressing of our own.”
Even so they kept one eye on the diplomatic weather, choosing first those peoples already marked as “suspect” by Russia. That people was the Armenians.
“The Russians have closed the Armenian schools and banned their newspapers.”
“Then we’ll do the same—step on them properly.”
The Porte had already grown thoroughly irritated by the Armenians’ swelling demands for independence after Berlin. “You promised reforms in our homeland at the Congress!” the Armenians protested. “These people have no sense of the situation,” the officials muttered. Secret societies, self-defense bands, open solidarity with Russia—there were more than enough reasons to crush the Armenians without mercy.
Thus the government’s policy of repression was prepared with cold organization.
“We are not in a position to afford the leisurely methods of the Europeans.”
In Europe the mobs had risen against the Jews of their own accord. In the Ottoman Empire the state itself sponsored Kurdish militias and set them loose to hunt Armenians.
“This task, therefore, we entrust to you Kurds.”
“Your Excellency, it is an honor.”
The Hamidiye cavalry rode into Armenian villages and made plunder and violence their daily trade.
“You know the rule, don’t you? If you’re not Muslim, you have no human rights.”
“Are you mad?”
“No—just looking for a little fun.”
They raped the women and murdered the men. Terror seized the Armenian communities. And so they began to behave much as the Jews of Europe had done.
“This country has gone insane.”
Those with the means fled at once for America or France. Those without abandoned the fields that had been their lifelong livelihood and fled to the cities.
“At least in the towns they won’t dare butcher people in the open.”
The authorities had counted on exactly that reaction.
“If they stay out in the countryside holding large tracts of land, they’ll only start shouting about separatism. This is the clean solution.”
There were limits, of course.
“You know the Russian frontier? Anyone who migrates that way will find life made very difficult indeed.”
The Armenians appealed to the great powers, begging them to force the Ottomans to honor the promises of Berlin. Their cries found no audience. France was too busy picking up the pieces of its shattered bourse. Germany had no desire to provoke Russia further—“There is nothing to be gained by ruffling Alexander III’s feathers any more than they already are.” Britain, the chief beneficiary of the existing order, preferred the status quo. “This is not our affair.”
Abandoned by everyone, the Armenians endured the persecution alone. At this stage the Ottoman government had not yet descended to the systematic confiscation of property that later generations would practice.
“We are not bandits.”
“Who do you think believes that?”
Nevertheless the flight of Armenian capital began in earnest, and the empire’s already fragile economy reeled under the blow. Since the establishment of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration in 1882, fiscal and economic sovereignty had been slipping into foreign hands. With the wealthy Armenians now departing, the empire was sliding toward the status of a semi-colony of the great powers. Left to itself, the Ottoman economy would almost certainly never have recovered.
Almost certainly.
“Which is precisely why we must intervene.”
Waldemar had no intention of allowing the Ottoman Empire to become a corpse. If I ever need to throttle Russia, Ottoman cooperation will be indispensable.
He contacted Rockefeller and proposed they prospect for oil in Ottoman territory.
“Oil in the Middle East?”
Rockefeller found the idea distinctly appealing. Most men would have fretted that a flood of new oil would crash the price; Rockefeller thought differently.
“If the price falls, every competitor who jumps into the market dies. That is pure profit.”
His people immediately signaled their willingness to dispatch petroleum engineers.
“The information will have to be reliable.”
“Of course. The moment negotiations with the Porte are concluded, send your men.”
Waldemar then informed the Crown Princess that he wished to invest capital in the Ottoman Empire.
“Invest in a country that is already ruined?”
This was a state that could not even pay the interest it had promised its creditors and had been forced into debt restructuring.
“Black gold,” Waldemar answered simply.
Through the Crown Princess he forwarded to the German government detailed reports pinpointing several oil deposits in Syria. Officially the data came from an “exploration party” he had sent; in truth they had come from his own memory.
“Oil? Did you just say oil?”
The Germans already possessed a vague sense of petroleum’s value—as a feedstock for the chemical industry, and, according to the British Admiralty, as the future fuel of the navy. Thanks to the synthetic rubber Waldemar had once used as a bluff, they now rated that value rather higher than most of their contemporaries.
“Should we help our own capital secure the concessions?”
“Obviously!”
The German government agreed to assist in obtaining the Syrian oil fields. The United States fell into step at once.
“An American company—Standard Oil—will be doing the developing? Then we have no reason to object.”
When two great powers jointly demanded the development rights, neither the Porte nor the Public Debt Administration could simply refuse.
“If we sell the rights, what is left for us?”
“Money.”
Waldemar and Rockefeller promised the Ottomans a handsome share.
“Twenty percent of the net profits.”
“You cannot be serious.”
“We do not tell that sort of lie.”
Starved for modern infrastructure investment, the Ottoman authorities went down on their knees before the cash. They sold every Syrian oil field outright to the Rockefeller interests.
“With this alone we can scoop up as much of Europe’s demand as we please.”
The development costs, of course, would not be paid by anyone else; yet infrastructure investment was profitable in the long run. The ports and railways built to move the oil would all fall under rights that Waldemar’s side could exercise—each of them another lever of influence over the Ottoman Empire.
One might reasonably ask why they left alone the far richer fields of the Persian Gulf, Arabia, and Iraq. The answer was simple. The Persian Gulf was a region of interest to the British Empire.
London had not yet stretched out its hand, but ever since the opening of the Suez Canal the area had lain within the circle of British nerves. To touch it would risk seriously annoying the English—exactly as Wilhelm had done with his Three-B Railway.
Arabia, whose security was bound up with the Red Sea, was equally off-limits. Iraq offered slightly better prospects, yet it lay too far from the Mediterranean; the infrastructure costs would have been prohibitive. And if one tried to ship the oil out through the Gulf, one was again staring at the British who controlled Suez.
Waldemar’s choice of Syria was therefore the only possible one. Even that was more than enough to capture the petroleum demand of the age. (The Syrian fields would not be discovered in earnest until the 1950s, but their scale—some two and a half billion barrels in total—was more than ample by the standards of the late nineteenth century.)
John Connor ran the numbers for the project and voiced his concern.
“If we finance the entire infrastructure as well, the outlay will be considerable.”
“We shall have to bear it.”
Waldemar paid little attention to the cost. To him money was now nothing more than figures written in a ledger. He wanted those few lines of ink transformed into real power and real influence.
“For the time being it will be difficult to extract profit from Ottoman infrastructure, but I ask you to give the matter careful attention.”
“Understood, Your Highness.”
With that, Waldemar completed one more essential piece of the imperial puzzle. All that remained was steel—the very wheat of industry.