Turkey: a Past and a Future — Text and Context

Landscape as Argument

Toynbee’s opening pages do not offer a conventional historical narrative. Instead, he builds a case through geography, listing Turkey’s regions in a breathless catalogue that emphasizes contrast: the desert of the Hedjaz, the rivers of Mesopotamia, the Armenian highlands “bleak as the Pamirs.” The cities, too, are presented as distinct characters—Adrianople a fortress, Constantinople a meeting place of races that “never mix,” Konia a bastion of native Anatolia. This method implies that Turkey’s diversity is not merely scenic but political: the empire’s unity is an artificial imposition over lands that resist it. Toynbee’s prose mirrors this tension, shifting from panoramic sweep to sharp detail, as when he notes that the Bagdad Railway’s route was chosen for strategic rather than economic reasons, passing through “the most barren parts of Central Anatolia.”

The Railway as Imperial Instrument

The Bagdad Railway serves as Toynbee’s central case study. He draws on German sources—Dr. Rohrbach and Wiedenfeld—to argue that the line was designed for military domination, not economic development. Rohrbach admits that the Anatolian section does not pay its way, while the French line from Smyrna to Afiun Kara Hissar is more profitable. Toynbee highlights the original plan to run the railway through Armenia, vetoed by Russia, and the subsequent deflection through the Taurus and Amanus mountains, requiring costly tunnels. He quotes Rohrbach’s concession that “the necessity consists in Turkey’s military interests,” allowing troops to move from Bagdad to Anatolia without a break. For Toynbee, this reveals the railway as a tool of Turco-German control over Arab lands, with economic logic sacrificed to strategic ends.

Contrasting Visions of Development

Toynbee contrasts the German-backed railway with alternative routes proposed by the British, such as Colonel Chesney’s 1830s survey and an 1867 House of Commons committee. These followed the ancient trade route from the Syrian coast to the Persian Gulf, which Rohrbach himself calls “the oldest, greatest, and still most promising trade-route of Western Asia.” Toynbee uses this contrast to underscore a broader tension: between development that serves local populations and infrastructure that enforces imperial control. He notes that the British projects were abandoned, while the German line proceeded—a choice he attributes to political rather than economic priorities. The unfinished state of the railway, like the unfinished history of Aleppo, becomes a symbol of the region’s uncertain future under competing great-power ambitions.

Toynbee’s essay is less a prediction than a diagnosis, rooted in the specific circumstances of 1917. Readers should attend to his use of German sources—Rohrbach and Wiedenfeld—which he deploys as evidence against the very project they defend. The work’s value lies in its close reading of a single infrastructure project as a lens for imperial strategy, and in its insistence that Turkey’s future cannot be understood without reckoning with its diverse past and the external forces that shaped it.

In Turkey: a Past and a Future, I often linger on how Toynbee traces imperial dreams along railway lines, quiet threads of ambition across vast lands. That same patient watching over a fragile map of intentions—where place and story lean on each other—returns to me in The flying spy — Story, Setting & Ideas, a gentler companion in the same dusty shelf-light.