The New Europe/Volume 6/Number 72/The Finance of the Anatolian Railway

by William Mitchell Ramsay

For other English-language translations of this work, see Epiphany Declaration.

The Finance of the Anatolian Railway

Sir William Ramsay, in a letter to us from Edinburgh, makes the following comment on Professor Holland Rose’s article, “The Encircling Myth once more” (The New Europe, No. 69):―

“On p. 107 Professor Holland Rose speaks about the Turkish railways in Asia Minor as ‘constructed mainly with German money.’ They were constructed almost entirely with French money, which was obtained through the Swiss banks, as the French Government did not allow direct dealings on the Bourse. This fact, I thought, was well known. It has often been published, and I have it on the authority of von Gwinner himself in the year 1910, when he was discussing the situation very openly, and stating his plans and views about the past and the present. I had come into relations with him, as I was writing a series of papers on the economic results attained by the German Anatolian Railway, and I wanted to get official statistics to bring out the facts. I went direct to von Gwinner in Berlin, and told him what I wished to do, and how I proposed to do it. It caused him a good deal of trouble to get statistics collected from different Turkish official documents, and he remarked that the plan which I was carrying out of arranging a series of statistics year by year, so that they told their own story without any comment, had not occurred to him, and seemed to him extremely useful. He declared that his desire was to get this money not only from France, but also from London.”