The Baghdad Railway and the Great War
How Britain Destroyed The World To Stop One Train - YouTube Economic Ambitions, Strategic Fears, and the Remaking of the Middle East Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF) The Berlin-Baghdad Railway was a significant factor in pre-WWI tensions but not the sole or primary cause of the conflict. While the video contains accurate elements about the railway's strategic importance, Ottoman debt crisis, and British concerns, it substantially overstates the railway's causative role in WWI and oversimplifies the complex, multicausal origins of the conflict. The railway was incomplete by 1914, and diplomatic accommodations had addressed many disputes before war began. Modern historiography emphasizes multiple converging factors—alliance systems, nationalism, militarism, and the July Crisis—rather than economic determinism centered on a single infrastructure project. The Railway That Never Quite Reached Baghdad On a sweltering July day in 1940, twenty-two years after the armistice t...
