Moguls and Mandarins

3

Agent of Empire? The National Bank of Turkey and British Foreign Policy

‘The National Bank of Turkey was founded in 1909 with British Government encouragement and support to further British economic enterprise in the Ottoman Empire’; so we are told in all the standard and respectable works on the subject.¹ This is correct in form but incorrect in substance, for one cannot accept the implications it carries with it, in some cases explicitly stated. These are that, in the first place, the Foreign Office was instrumental in actually starting the Bank, in the second place, that the Bank succeeded very far in its objects, and in the third place, that it ever received much Foreign Office support in what it sought to do.

The Bank had, in fact, an ...