[photochemsyn]

Some historians point to the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway (barely mentioned in the article) as playing a primary role in the outbreak of World War I. The naval forces of Britain had made the decision to switch from coal to oil, and that mean Britain would have a more maneuverable and faster fleet than Germany - so Germany followed suit. Unlike British sea access to Persian oil at the time, the only German option was transport of oil from Mesopotamia via the Berlin to Baghdad railway.

Here's a pretty comprehensive discussion of the history, which actually points to World War One being initiated as the first of many wars by colonial powers over control of Middle Eastern oil:

> "By 1912, German industry and government realized that oil was the fuel of its economic future and similarly to Britain it needed a supply of its own that would reduce their import dependency. Upon discovering more fields between Mosul and Baghdad where the last part of the rail link would go led to further potential friction with Britain and the necessity to protect its interests in the areas that surrounded the link which the Deutsche Bank negotiated in the same year. This would’ve provided the German government with an overland route to ship the oil out of Mesopatamia without the need to confront the British over Kuwait." [1]

[1] https://carlcymrushistoryblog.wordpress.com/2014/04/18/the-b...

[jcranmer]

Linking World War I to an oil race between Germany and Britain is... really pushing it. To the extent that Anglo-German enmity played a major role in forming the alliance blocs pre-WWI, that is more because Kaiser Wilhelm canned Bismarck in favor of a more aggressive foreign policy that, quite frankly, pissed everybody else off, leading to German diplomatic isolation.

The idea that competition for oil was a major player in that is only viable if you ignore the minor fact that causes happen before actions. To summarize the underlying assertions: the Berlin-Baghdad railway, built in 1889, was needed to transport the new critical resource of oil from its discovery in the Ottoman Empire in 1908 for the insatiable demand of coal-fired dreadnoughts like HMS Dreadnought (1906). (Yes, coal-fired--as far as I'm aware, all of the German capital ships built or planned before or during WWI were primarily coal-fired. The decisive move from coal to oil happens largely at the tail end of WWI, way too late to be a major factory in strategic thinking to motivate foreign policy in the run up to WWI.)

[pjc50]

Yes - and a similar story plays out in WW2, as Germany still didn't have any domestic oil. Hence the push east towards the oilfields of Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, halted at the Volga (Stalingrad) and the Terek river/Caucasus mountains.

I should get round to reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prize:_The_Epic_Quest_for_...

[Mlller]

But “without the need to confront the British over Kuwait” seems to indicate that this railway project in itself was good for keeping peace because it decreased the conflict potential.

[breckenedge]

That’s fascinating, I hadn’t come across that. Britain must have needed a ridiculous amount of oil as they were also importing from Mexico at the time. According to Tuchman’s The Zimmerman Telegram, Mexican oil is one of the big reasons that Germany tried to form an alliance with Mexico. Cutting off that oil would have hindered their navy.

[kingcharles]

How much oil did Britain need? We always had access to our own oil reservoirs too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_oil

It looks like the Germans had access to it, also?

[MomoXenosaga]

The British Navy was vastly more powerful and would have had little trouble blockading Mexico and sinking any German oil tankers. The resources of colonial empires decided the victors of both world wars in my opinion.