The dismemberment of Turkey into European colonies is the goal steadily held in view since the loss of the Holy Land to Christendom. It will be the last chapter in the long history of Europe’s commercial conquest of western Asia. Three causes militate in favor of an eventual partition. The country is rich in natural resources. It is held by a people whose incompetence to convert nature’s gifts into use or profit is historically patent. It also happens to occupy a commanding situation with reference to the trade of Europe with Asia and Africa. These three points are fundamental in the solution of the Turkish problem.
The European nations most vitally concerned in the dismemberment of the Sultan’s dominions are four in number. Great Britain’s interest is born of the Empire’s relation to Egypt and India. The cause of Russian progress depends on the country’s access to warm seaports. Germany is the newcomer on the scene and, as a land power, is engaged in extending her land area. To her sons Turkey offers an attractive colonization area and at the same time the land route which will render them independent of the sea-way passing through Suez to the east. As a colonial power of the first magnitude, no less than on account of her millions of Mohammedan subjects, France cannot be disinterested in the fate of the corelands of Islam.
Turkey is the Asiatic pendant of the intercontinental highway represented in Europe by the Balkan peninsula. Through Asia Minor the land provides a convenient causeway between Asia and Europe. Through Arabia it connects Asia to Africa. Again, through the combined position of Asia Minor and Syria it becomes possible to maintain continuous land travel from Europe to Africa. Turkey is thus the ideal center of the eastern hemisphere. Mastery of its territory is bound to turn the flow of intercontinental trade into the lap of its holders. The entire history of European conflict over Turkish lands is wrapped up in this geographical fact.
Italians were the pioneers of European trade with Turkey after the consolidation of Ottoman power. In this Genoese and Venetian traders merely followed in the footsteps of their fathers, whose dealings with the Byzantines had been considerable. French merchants were not slow to compete with Italians. In the fifteenth century British drapers and commissioners begin to appear in the Levant. Germans show signs of activity a hundred years later, but confine their operation mainly to the European dominions of the Sultans. From these beginnings to the twentieth-century territorial claims of the great powers is but a natural economic unfolding.