Another interpretation of WWI from the view of British-German
rivalry:
Oil and the origins of the War to make the world safe for
Democracy
By F. William Engdahl
Abstract:
At first almost unnoticed after
1850, then with significant intensity after the onset of the Great
Depression of 1873 in Britain, the sun began to set on the British
Empire.
By the end of the 19th Century, though the City of London remained
undisputed financier of the world, British industrial excellence
was in terminal decline. The decline paralleled an equally dramatic
rise of a new industrial Great Power on the European stage, the
German Reich.
Germany soon passed England in output of steel, in quality of
machine tools, chemicals and electrical goods. Beginning the 1880s
a group of leading German industrialists and bankers around
Deutsche Banks Georg von Siemens, recognized the urgent need for
some form of colonial sources of raw materials as well as
industrial export outlet.
With Africa and Asia long since claimed by the other Great Powers,
above all Great Britain, German policy set out to develop a special
economic sphere in the imperial provinces of the debt-ridden
Ottoman Empire. The policy was termed penetration pacifique an
economic dependency which would be sealed with German military
advisors and equipment. Initially, the policy was not greeted with
joy in Paris, St. Petersburg or London, but it was tolerated.
Deutsche Bank even sought, unsuccessfully, to enlist City of London
financial backing for the keystone of the Ottoman expansion
policythe Berlin-to-Baghdad railway project, a project of enormous
scale and complexity that would link the interior of Anatolia and
Mesopotamia (today Iraq) to Germany. What Berlin and Deutsche Bank
did not say was that they had secured subsurface mineral rights,
including for oil along the path of the railway, and that their
geologists had discovered petroleum in Mosul, Kirkuk and
Basra.
The conversion of the British Navy under Churchill to oil from coal
meant a high risk strategy as England had abundant coal but no
then-known oil. It secured a major concession from the Shah of
Persia in the early 1900s. The Baghdad rail link was increasingly
seen in London as a threat to precisely this oil security.
The British response to the growing German disruption of the
European balance of power after the 1890s was to carefully craft a
series of public and secret alliances with France and with
Russiaformer rivalsto encircle Germany.
As well, she deployed a series of less public intrigues to disrupt
the Balkans and encourage a revolt against the Ottoman Sultan via
the Young Turks that severely weakened the prospects for the German
Drang nach Osten.
The dynamic of the rise of German assertiveness, including in
addition to the Baghdad rail, the decision in 1900 to build a
modern navy over two decades that could rival Englands, set the
stage for the outbreak of a war in August 1914 whose real
significance was a colossal and tragic struggle for who would
succeed the ebbing power of the British Empire.
The resolution of that epic struggle was to take a second world war
and another quarter century before the victor was undeniably
established.
The role of oil in the events leading to war in 1914 is too little
appreciated. When the historical process behind the war is examined
from this light a quite different picture emerges. The British
Empire in the decades following 1873 and the American Century
hegemony in the decades following approximately 1973 have more in
common than is generally appreciated...
http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/History/Oil_and_the_Origins_of_World_W/oil_and_the_origins_of_world_w.HTM