The Chester Concessions 340 TURKEY, THE GREAT POWERS, AND THE BAGDAD RAILWAY TURKEY, THE GREAT POWERS AND THE BAGDAD RAILWAY A Study in Imperialism CHAPTER I AN ANCIENT TRADE ROUTE IS REVIVED Many a glowing tale has been told of the great Commercial Revolution of the sixteenth century and of the consequent partial abandonment of the trans-Asiatic trade routes to India in favor of the newer routes by water around the Cape of Good Hope. It is sometimes overlooked, however, that a commercial revolution of the nineteenth century, occasioned by the adaptation of the steam engine to land and marine transportation, was of perhaps equal significance. Cheap carriage by the ocean greyhound instead of the stately clipper, by locomotive-drawn trains instead of stage-coach and caravan, made possible the extension of trade to the innermost and outermost parts of the earth and increased the volume of the world’s commerce to undreamed of proportions. This latter commercial revolution led not only to the opening of new avenues of communication, but also to the regeneration of trade-routes which had been dormant or decayed for centuries. During the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth, the medieval trans-Asiatic highways to the East were rediscovered. The first of these medieval trade-routes to be revived by modern commerce was the so-called southern route. In the fifteenth century curious Oriental craft had brought their wares from eastern Asia across the Indian Ocean and up the Red Sea to some convenient port on the Egyptian shore; here their cargoes were trans-shipped _via_ caravan to Alexandria and Cairo, marts of trade with the European cities of the Mediterranean. The completion of the Suez Canal, in 1869, transformed this route of medieval merchants into an avenue of modern transportation, incidentally realizing the dream of Portuguese and Spanish explorers of centuries before—a short, all-water route to the Indies. Less than forty years later the northern route of medieval commerce—from the “back doors” of China and India to the plains of European Russia—was opened to the twentieth-century locomotive. With the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1905 the old caravan trails were paralleled with steel rails. The Trans-Siberian system linked Moscow and Petrograd with Vladivostok and Pekin; the Trans-Caspian and Trans-Persian railways stretched almost to the mountain barrier of northern India; the Trans-Caucasian lines provided the link between the Caspian and Black Seas.